Self-Reference – Lesson 5

Table of Contents

• The shofar, halakhic disputes, and the status of tradition
• After-the-fact explanations, Kabbalah, and the principle of “satisfying all opinions”
• The philosophical introduction: Ron Aharoni and the definition of philosophy
• “What is philosophy?” as a descriptive question: Aharoni’s claim and the critique of it
• Game theory, economics, and “what happens” versus “what ought to happen”
• Aharoni on estrangement, self-reference, and the transformation of detachment
• Paradoxes and self-reference: the liar paradox, a flashlight, and an eye
• Idealism and solipsism: “Is there an external world?”
• Good, beauty, truth: ethics, aesthetics, and logic versus sociological description
• Estrangement versus detachment, “I love myself,” and the roles of the self
• Conclusion and continuation after the holidays

Summary

General overview

The text opens with a historical question about the uncertainty surrounding teru’ah and shevarim in the shofar, and about similar disputes in Jewish law. It suggests that sometimes disputes arise around what ought to be done, not around an actual transmitted tradition, until a solution is found that covers several approaches when no ruling can be reached. From there, the speaker moves to a summary and critique of Ron Aharoni’s claims about philosophy as a field defined by self-reference without estrangement, which, according to him, leads to a circular failure, and therefore makes philosophy an “empty” field. The speaker argues with Aharoni already at the level of his introduction, claiming that the question “What is philosophy?” is a philosophical and essential question, not a descriptive-observational one, and goes on to show that, in his view, Aharoni’s transformation of detachment does not eliminate philosophical questions, and that one must distinguish between estrangement and detachment.

The shofar, halakhic disputes, and the status of tradition

The speaker asks how the historical uncertainty arose regarding what exactly counts as teru’ah and what counts as teki’ah in the shofar, despite generations of continuous practice, and compares this to the dispute between Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam over the passages in tefillin, and to the dispute between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai over Hanukkah candles. He argues that in the case of Hanukkah candles, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel are not disputing what the original enactment of the Hasmonean court was, but what ought to be done, and he adds that the dispute may have been decided before the communities split. He suggests that someone can say, “The tradition exists,” but still claim that it is not correct and choose a different path. From this he concludes that tradition is not “a stone that may not be challenged,” but something that can be challenged when one thinks it is mistaken. He says that when there is no decision between two reasonable positions, a solution is found that fulfills both, and in shofar-blowing that is expressed through multiple series of blasts, whereas where there is a clear halakhic ruling there is no point in “satisfying all opinions.”

After-the-fact explanations, Kabbalah, and the principle of “satisfying all opinions”

The speaker rejects the claim that the complex enactment regarding the shofar was originally instituted because of kabbalistic reasons involving different spiritual effects of shevarim, teru’ah, and teki’ah. He says that “after-the-fact explanations can always be given,” but that it is not plausible that this was the original reason for the enactment, and that “it doesn’t follow from the language of the Talmud.” He says that the principle of “satisfying all opinions” applies when there is no ruling, especially in Torah-level matters, whereas when there is an accepted halakhic ruling there is no reason to combine other opinions. He emphasizes that there are “lots of disputes in the Talmud,” and no one thinks they all have to be observed simultaneously; what was ruled is what obligates.

The philosophical introduction: Ron Aharoni and the definition of philosophy

The speaker returns to Ron Aharoni’s critique of philosophy and presents Aharoni’s central claim: that philosophy has a special “flavor” because it is based on self-reference without estrangement—that is, identifying the “I” with the self, without distinguishing between subject and object. He says that Aharoni claims this structure is a circular failure, so it not only defines philosophy but also shows that philosophy is an empty field of mistakes. The speaker brings Aharoni’s parable of “the king who wanted to appoint an oversight committee,” which then has to review itself and becomes entangled, and presents this as a metaphor for the way Aharoni sees philosophy.

“What is philosophy?” as a descriptive question: Aharoni’s claim and the critique of it

The speaker presents Aharoni’s claim that the question “What is philosophy?” is not a philosophical question but a descriptive one, answerable by observation, and therefore belongs to the sciences rather than to philosophy. He says that Aharoni assumes a binary division: either claims are descriptive-scientific, or they are arbitrary subjective “decisions,” with no third category. The speaker attacks this by arguing that a survey asking what counts as philosophy creates a loop that can never get started, because those being asked do not conduct another survey in order to answer; they use criteria and conceptual understanding. Therefore, the issue has an essential dimension and is not merely descriptive. He argues that this mechanism also makes it impossible to criticize people’s answers, whereas in practice people do say, “You’re wrong—that’s a scientific question, not a philosophical one.” So the question is not descriptive, but a question about what ought to be called philosophy. He says that questions like “What is mathematics?” or “What is physics?” are philosophical for the same reason, and he proposes, as an alternative definition of philosophy, “observations through the mind’s eye” of ideas or concepts.

Game theory, economics, and “what happens” versus “what ought to happen”

The speaker uses the example of economics and game theory to distinguish between a description of reality and a normative-ideal model of rationality. He presents a critique of economics for assuming rational agents, and suggests a possible response: that the theory is not describing what actually happens, but what should happen in an ideal world. He says that game theory, as a branch of mathematics, does not depend on describing the world, but on logical derivations from ideas, and that the question of how well it matches reality is a separate descriptive question. He compares this to the question “What is philosophy?” as a question about what it is correct to call philosophy, not about what people in fact call it.

Aharoni on estrangement, self-reference, and the transformation of detachment

The speaker summarizes Aharoni’s two assumptions: “Looking at another person is not philosophy” and “Proper self-investigation is in every way similar to investigating another person.” He presents Aharoni’s commitment to show that every philosophical problem disappears, or ceases to be philosophical, when it is reformulated about someone else. He describes Aharoni’s “transformation of analysis” as replacing the “self” with a figure like Reuven, so that the question either evaporates into nonsense (in “archetypal” problems) or turns into a descriptive scientific question (in “non-archetypal” problems). The speaker argues that even if this were true, it still would not prove that there is no philosophy, because a question about myself, without detachment, can remain philosophical.

Paradoxes and self-reference: the liar paradox, a flashlight, and an eye

The speaker presents Aharoni’s attempt to solve paradoxes of self-reference through detachment, and argues that this does not solve the problem but only changes the wording. He says that the claim that self-reference is necessarily paradoxical is false, and gives the example of a general sentence that refers to itself—“Every sentence is made of words”—which is not paradoxical. He rejects Aharoni’s examples of a flashlight illuminating itself and an eye seeing itself, arguing that the obstacle there is physical, not logical, and therefore one cannot infer from them any general rule about the logical impossibility of thought thinking about thought.

Idealism and solipsism: “Is there an external world?”

The speaker presents the question of the existence of the external world as a well-defined philosophical question, and says he is not troubled by it because he has an answer. He quotes Aharoni, who claims that the question depends on a person asking it about himself, and that when it is reformulated about Reuven—“Is the whole world Reuven’s dream?”—it becomes “pointless,” and so it is an archetypal problem that dissolves through detachment. The speaker argues that Aharoni carries out the substitution in a way that artificially empties the question of content, because the fundamental question is “Does a world exist outside?” and not “Is what I see an illusion?” The latter, he says, is a derivative epistemic formulation, not the foundation. He emphasizes that “estrangement is not detachment,” and that even when you look at yourself from the outside, you do not ignore the fact that it is you, and therefore the question does not disappear.

Good, beauty, truth: ethics, aesthetics, and logic versus sociological description

The speaker quotes Aharoni’s claim that questions like “What is the good,” “What is the beautiful,” and “What is truth” become, once separated, descriptive questions such as “What are Reuven’s moral values?” or “How do human beings use the concept of truth?” At that point, says Aharoni, the “feeling of philosophy” disappears even though the content remains. The speaker responds that the people being asked do not answer by observing their own behavior, but by thinking and deciding, so here too turning the question into a descriptive one misses the essential issue. He argues that the real question is “What is moral?” or “What ought to be moral in my eyes?” and not “What seems moral to me?” Therefore, even if Reuven says that murder seems moral to him, one can still tell him, “That’s not correct.” He says that when the question is properly formulated, the transformation of analysis does not eliminate its philosophical character and does not turn it into a scientific question.

Estrangement versus detachment, “I love myself,” and the roles of the self

The speaker explains that estrangement is an intellectual action necessary for defining a self-relation, like the linguistic distinction between “I” as subject and “myself” as object—as in “I love myself,” not “I love I.” He rejects ontological duality or split personality, and argues that there is one person with “two forms of reference” or “two roles,” similar to a person who is both “my father’s son” and “my son’s father.” He says that Aharoni “loses the as-if” and turns estrangement into detachment, whereas in reality estrangement does not require forgetting or ignoring what a person knows about himself.

Conclusion and continuation after the holidays

The speaker concludes by saying that this is the end of the philosophical introduction to self-reference, and declares that after Sukkot he will return to halakhic applications, where “similar tensions” and parallel questions will appear. He closes with blessings: “May you be sealed for good, a good year, a happy holiday, happy holidays,” and says they will meet on the first Thursday after Sukkot.

Does anyone have a question? Okay. I was thinking about the issue of the shofar, where with the blasts we don’t know exactly what the teru’ah is and what this is—how did that happen historically? After all, there was continuity the whole time; they blew the shofar in every generation, so what happened in the middle? Similar questions come up regarding the dispute between Rashi and Rabbenu Tam about the passages in tefillin; likewise Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai about lighting Hanukkah candles—whether you keep increasing or keep decreasing. What did your father do? Or what did you do last year? I think that many times there are places where there’s some local explanation. For example, with Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel—I once even inferred this from Maimonides—it seems that Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel weren’t disputing what the enactment of the Hasmonean court originally was. Rather, they were disputing what is proper to do. They were really the ones who innovated this whole idea of increasing or decreasing the candles, not the original legislators. The Talmud, if I remember correctly, says—and Maimonides also says, he brought a Talmudic passage—that there was a period when they didn’t light candles at all, until it sort of crystallized, if I remember correctly. I don’t remember any Maimonides like that. Okay. In any case, that’s a specific issue, but more generally I think that sometimes the argument is about what is correct, what is proper to do, and not about what people actually did. It could be that they didn’t do it that way, but I think that’s how it should be done. Like Rabbenu Tam and Rashi. What did Rabbenu Tam see from his grandfather? He didn’t care what he saw from his grandfather; he decided that this is correct, and from his standpoint that’s what ought to be done. Yes, but with shofar blowing it seems like something communal—like, for example, we don’t see Yemenites blowing a different teru’ah from all other Yemenites, or among Sephardim, Ashkenazim. So what does that prove? No, it says that there wasn’t a dispute about what was proper to do, because if there had been such a dispute, it should have spread to many places, not just… First Temple, that’s already… What do you mean First Temple? Yemenites are First Temple? Yes, that’s the tradition—that First Temple. So how did the Talmud get there? How did the Oral Torah? It’s not like the Ethiopians. No, no, it did get there, it did. In short, it was decided, it was settled before the split among the different communities, but it was settled when there was some discussion of what in fact was correct to do. And that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some existing tradition when that discussion arose. Someone said: with all due respect to the existing tradition, I don’t think it’s right; I think it should be done differently. That really sheds an interesting light on our attitude toward tradition, which is so commonly treated among us as some kind of stone tablet that must not be questioned. It’s something that received a very, very strong status. And I really think these examples show that it’s not so. If you think the tradition is wrong, then do what you think, and not what tradition says. Yes, but on the other hand, in the end they combined both things; they didn’t say this one is right and that one is wrong. They said: let’s do this and this and this, and that way you satisfy everything. Because they didn’t reach a conclusion about who was right. If they had reached a conclusion about who was right, they would have voted and decided. But if they didn’t decide, and there were two positions and both seemed reasonable, then they found some solution that satisfies both. Okay, thanks. Yes, there are always the after-the-fact explanations. Usually that comes from Kabbalah, where they explain why really all these blasts are needed, and it’s not because of laws of doubt at all, but because ideally each one is appropriate: shevarim makes this correction, teru’ah makes that correction, and teki’ah makes another correction. Does the Rabbi hold by that position? No. Good. Look, after-the-fact explanations can always exist. You can explain anything after the fact. But to explain that this was originally the reason they instituted this complicated enactment—that sounds very far-fetched to me. It certainly doesn’t emerge from the language of the Talmud. There was some discussion here in the chats, from what I noticed. The point is that satisfying all opinions applies where you have no decision. Where there is a ruling, there is no reason whatsoever to satisfy all opinions. There are lots of disputes all over the Talmud; nobody even imagines saying that we have to satisfy all opinions. We issue a halakhic ruling, and what was ruled is what obligates. Where there are positions and both remain standing, and there’s no decision between them—there, at least for Torah-level matters, and maybe in general—yes, there are views that even in rabbinic-level doubt maybe one should not necessarily be lenient—but where there is a ruling, there is a ruling. There is no special value in satisfying all opinions. Fine.

So last time I spoke a bit about Ron Aharoni’s critique of philosophy as a discussion wholly focused on self-reference. That’s why I’m dwelling on him a bit. This will basically conclude my philosophical introduction to the matter of self-reference. After the holidays—this is the last time—after the holidays we’ll return to the halakhic applications of the issue. But, as is my way in all these series, I first give some broader conceptual and philosophical introduction. So today I want to finish it, and what I mean is to finish the discussion of Aharoni.

Let me summarize a bit what we saw. Aharoni’s claim was that what defines philosophy is essentially that it deals with issues based on self-reference—but not just self-reference, rather self-reference without estrangement. Meaning, without carefully distinguishing between the “I” and the “self,” but identifying the I with the self, and that creates a kind of issue that has a philosophical flavor, a kind of smell, a feeling of philosophicity when we encounter it. And his claim is that this self-reference is, in essence, a failure—a failure of circularity. So not only does this characteristic define the concept of philosophy, or philosophical issues, the philosophicity of philosophical issues; it actually shows that this whole field—philosophy—is empty. Because all the issues included in it are really issues built on an error, issues built on a failure. So first he defined what all these issues have in common—what philosophy is, what philosophicity is—and then he took a further step and said that once we’ve defined it, I’ll show you that in this definition there is a defect, and therefore it really contains nothing, no content, nothing at all. Simply a collection of failures, of mistakes. That is his claim.

And if we sharpen what he means by self-reference, he basically says: all philosophical issues, every last one of them, are issues in which I relate to myself and I don’t take care to see the self—the I that has undergone estrangement, the object upon which I, as subject, am looking—as some object detached from the observing subject. In my language, I say: they don’t perform estrangement. And then a failure of self-reference is created, and that is what distinguishes philosophy. Distinguishes it—and then also nullifies it, with an aleph.

Now, we began with his introduction. And in the introduction he brought that parable about the king who wanted to appoint a committee in the state comptroller’s department to review all the processes in the state. Then they would have to review themselves and review themselves simultaneously in the course of that very review, which itself would review itself, and in short the moral of the story is philosophy: a kind of self-reference that leads only to tangles and contradictions and logical problems.

Now, when he spoke about the question “What is philosophy?” in that introduction, he said that basically the question “What is philosophy?” is not a question in philosophy. It is a descriptive question, and as such it cannot be a philosophical question; it is a question that comes to describe facts. The answer to it must be given through observation. And of course that is something that cannot characterize philosophy. That characterizes science. Science seeks its answers in terms of observation. If philosophy asks a question whose answer can be given in terms of observation, that means it isn’t philosophy. Therefore he says that the question “what is” — and this is a claim independent of his broader claim — he says that the question “what is philosophy?” is itself not a philosophical question. Why? Because it is basically a descriptive question. Let’s see what people tend to regard as philosophy. What kinds of issues get labeled by them as philosophical issues, or what kinds of issues evoke in us the scent of philosophicity. Right? And once you survey that, it’s like asking what people like to eat. That’s not a question in philosophy; it’s a descriptive question. Observe, ask people, see what they like and don’t like, summarize your conclusions, and that’s the answer. It’s a scientific question. A descriptive scientific question. A question answered through observation. Therefore it cannot be a philosophical question.

And his underlying assumption all along, of course, is that questions can be divided into only two types. One type is descriptive scientific questions, and the other type is what he calls “decisions,” in quotation marks. “Decisions” meaning arbitrary, subjective matters, where you simply decide, but it’s not something claiming to be a truth-claim in any meaningful sense. This is what I think, this is how I feel, and that’s all. I’m not trying to make some claim and stand behind it. He doesn’t recognize any additional type of claim. Either the claim is descriptive-scientific, or the claim is basically a kind of decision—something arbitrary.

Now, in the context of the question “What is philosophy?” he argues that we’re dealing with a descriptive question, like the question what psychology is, what science is, what mathematics is, why people call certain things by certain names. It’s a descriptive question: just check what people call this and what they don’t call that. I criticized this claim of his—not connected yet to his general claim. His general claim says that every philosophical question involves the failure of self-reference; we’ll deal with that in a moment. Right now I’m talking about his introduction. His introduction says that the specific question “What is philosophy?” is not a philosophical question. Fine. He didn’t say there are no philosophical questions. He said this particular question is not philosophical. Then afterward he moves on to the general claim that there is no such thing as philosophical questions at all. I disagree with him on this point too, even though it is not tied to the general statement. And later you’ll see why it matters to me to focus on this point as well, because it’s very similar to my dispute with him about the general question as well—my attitude toward him on the overall issue.

At the end of the previous class I explained that the point is this: let’s try to think how the scientific work that is supposed to answer this question would actually be done. What are we supposed to do? We’re supposed to conduct a survey among people, ask them: tell me, is the question whether quantum theory is true or not a philosophical question? They’ll say: of course not, that’s a scientific question. Is the question whether a world exists or doesn’t exist—is that a philosophical question? They’ll say yes. Is the question whether we have free choice or not a philosophical question? They’ll say yes. And so on. Gather all these questions, create a list, and that will be your answer to the question “What is philosophy?” Therefore, the very fact that I arrived at this through observational means, descriptive means, simply by checking what the facts are, means that the question “What is philosophy?” is itself a scientific question.

By the way, it is usually accepted that the question “What is science?” is a philosophical question. What is psychology? What is mathematics? What is physics? Those are philosophical questions. He turns the whole table upside down. He argues that even the question “What is philosophy?” is not a philosophical question. Certainly not the question “What is psychology?” or “What is mathematics?” or “What is physics?” But even the question “What is philosophy?” is not philosophical. What does he define as philosophy? What people define as philosophy. Check and see. When he says that it’s not a philosophical question, then what is he defining as philosophy? I don’t know how he defines philosophy. He needs to ask people, conduct a survey, summarize the survey’s findings, and the list of subjects about which people say “these are philosophical issues”—that is philosophy. He didn’t give the list there, the result. In his book he gives a list of quite a few issues that are indeed commonly regarded as philosophical questions, and in that sense he sort of does this in the subtext of the book. But explicitly, when he talks about it, he doesn’t give the answer. He only says that the question “What is philosophy?” is a scientific and not a philosophical question. He doesn’t say what his answer to that question actually is.

Now here I said there is a certain flaw—and not only is there a flaw, but in a certain sense he himself, he himself—right, Ido, I agree with your remark—he himself falls here into a scientificity fallacy, into a fallacy of circularity. Why? Because when I ask people what kind of issue they call philosophical, we talked about this last time. What kind of issue do you call philosophical? Now I ask myself: if someone asked me that question, what would be my criterion by which I’d answer? Suppose Ron Aharoni comes and asks me—asks you and you and you—he conducts a survey to determine what philosophy is. Each one of us has to give him answers: yes, that question is philosophical; no, that question is not philosophical; and so on. But Ron Aharoni assumes that the answer to the question “What is philosophy?” is obtained scientifically. So what am I supposed to do in order to answer him when he conducts the survey and gets to me and asks me? How am I supposed to decide which issue is philosophical? Do I also need to conduct a survey? And if I conduct a survey and ask other people, how will they answer me? They’ll also conduct a survey. In other words, there’s a loop here that never starts. In effect, without noticing, he assumes that what I answer him—no problem, I can produce that without a survey. So why does he need a survey when he comes to answer the question “What is philosophy?” I don’t need a survey, so why does he? After all, when he comes to ask me as part of his survey, he doesn’t expect me to conduct a survey myself too—a meta-survey, as it were. Which means his assumption is that I can answer him even without asking other people. On what basis will I answer him? Clearly I’m supposed to have some criteria of my own for what I call philosophy. So why can’t he use those same criteria?

More than that: if I really do have those criteria, then you understand that this is no longer a scientific question. Call it philosophical or definitional or whatever you like, but it’s not a scientific question and not even a descriptive one. I need to decide what counts as philosophy. I don’t need to observe and report on what is called philosophy. I’m supposed to decide, make a determination, and answer him what I think should be called philosophy.

Moreover, as I said last time too: if someone answers me that the question whether quantum theory is true is a philosophical question, I’ll tell him no, you’re mistaken. That’s a scientific question, not a philosophical one. Now, according to the picture he presents, I can’t argue with someone who answers me. After all, all my knowledge of what philosophy is comes from these surveys themselves. I ask people, hear from them, record their answers, summarize them, and what comes out is my answer to the question “What is philosophy?” So how can I criticize an answer I receive from one of those people? On what basis can I criticize it? After all, his answer is the basis for my definition of what philosophy is. According to his method, I really can’t criticize someone who tells me, I don’t know, that the question whether this table is made of wood is a question in philosophy. Okay? He can’t argue with me because, from his point of view, the answer to that question is whatever I answer—I and all sorts of people like me. And of course that makes no sense.

By the same token, that’s why I also don’t agree, by the way, that the question “What is mathematics?” or “What is physics?” or “What is psychology?” is a scientific descriptive question. That’s not true. It’s a philosophical question. All those questions are philosophical questions for exactly the same reasons. Because when I conduct a survey and ask people: is this mathematics, is this mathematics, or is this psychology, is this psychology—on what basis will they themselves answer me? They themselves won’t conduct a survey. They themselves understand the concept of psychology or mathematics or physics, and based on that they try to answer which issues fall under that heading and which do not. Which means they don’t need a survey. They truly have an essential definition. Then I ask: where did that essential definition come from? How do they know? He asks me—he comes to ask me what counts, in my view, as a philosophical issue. Is this question philosophical? Is that question philosophical? So I say: I have some criteria, and according to them I answer him: this issue is philosophical, that one is philosophical, that one is philosophical. So what is that? It’s some kind of grasp of the concept. I understand what philosophy is, define it, and on that basis decide of each question whether it is philosophical or not.

That is exactly the alternative definition I proposed for the concept of philosophy: observation by the eyes of the intellect, not by the regular senses, but observation by the eyes of the intellect of ideas or concepts. The products of those observations are philosophical claims. That is my claim. That is my definition of the concept of philosophy. And it seems to me that if you follow what he himself proposes, you arrive directly at my definition. Because when he asks each of ten people what they call philosophy, what does each of those people do in order to answer? He activates his intuition, tries to understand the concept of philosophy, to observe—not with the eyes but with the eyes of the intellect—the concept of philosophy, and from that decide which question is philosophical and which isn’t. So why shouldn’t Ron Aharoni himself do the same thing? Why does he need a survey if none of the respondents need a survey? So why do you need one? Are you more foolish than they are? You can do exactly what they do. Therefore, his claim in the introduction is completely circular. I find it very problematic.

Why can’t he cross-reference information? Meaning, the more people answer that question, then he strings together the whole picture? If you ask everyone in the world what physics is, and based on the majority’s answers you determine what physics is, you won’t get very far. Most people in the world don’t know how to define physics. I’m not sure physicists do either, but laymen probably don’t. Yes. By what criterion will you choose physicists? Why specifically them? You’re just arbitrarily deciding that only what physicists think is physics is what gets defined as physics. And now I’ll ask you: who is a physicist? A physicist is someone who deals with physics. But you don’t know what physics is; you need to hear the physicists’ answers in order to decide what physics is. But how do you know what a physicist is if you don’t know what physics is? A physicist is someone who deals with physics. Ah, okay, I get it. You won’t get out of that. In other words, the attempt to translate a philosophical question into a descriptive one—no, it’s a dead end. You won’t be able to get out of it. Therefore my dispute with him begins already in his introduction, when he discusses the question “What is philosophy?” Even before his discussion of whether there is any such thing as philosophy at all. The question whether “What is philosophy?” is itself a philosophical question or not—my answer is yes. And his answer is circular. So it’s not even really a dispute; he’s just wrong.

I’ll try to show later that this problem, though it isn’t directly connected to our topic, is a paradigm case for the problematic nature of all his critique. I gave an example of this with the circularity in the thesis of multiple intelligences. There too, you build the concept of intelligence by observing what people call intelligence. Then after you’ve built the concept of intelligence, you go to people and say: wait, wait, you’re mistaken. You think this is intelligent and that isn’t intelligent—not true; here’s the definition, and you see that both this one and that one fit the definition. Maradona and Einstein, as I mentioned last time. Both fit the definition, therefore both are intelligent. But I don’t understand—if the concept of intelligence was distilled from what people call intelligence, then how can you now take that concept and use it to criticize what people tell you? If it doesn’t fit, that only means you didn’t distill correctly what they told you. That’s all. Very similar circularity to what happens with Aharoni.

I’ll add one more thing here regarding the question “What is philosophy?” When I say that I can argue with someone whom I ask what philosophy is, and he tells me this issue is philosophical, and I tell him you’re talking nonsense, this is not a philosophical issue—then you understand that if that is really the case, it follows immediately that this is not a descriptive question. Because if it were a descriptive question, then what he tells me is the answer. I want to describe what people call philosophy. What they say is the answer; there’s nothing to argue about. So what is the question “What is philosophy?” Then what am I proposing instead? I want to argue that the question “What is philosophy?” means: what ought to be called philosophy. Not what people in fact call philosophy, but what ought to be called philosophy, what is correct to call philosophy. Not everyone is right when they call something philosophy or not philosophy. Therefore this is not a descriptive question at all; it is an essential question. In a descriptive question, I stick to what people do. What people do is, for me, the answer. It’s not something I can criticize, because what people do defines the answer. That’s in a descriptive question. But my claim is that this is not a descriptive question. It’s not a question of what people do, but of what people should do.

This is similar, therefore, to game theory. There is a lot of criticism of game theory and of economics in general, because economics usually assumes that the agents in the field are rational agents. Meaning, people operating in the economic field are assumed to act rationally. And often there is criticism of economics because that assumption is unreasonable—people don’t always act rationally. Therefore economics doesn’t really describe what actually happens. One possible way of responding to that criticism, by the way, is to say: true, economics does not come to describe. Economic science, as economic theory, does not necessarily come to describe what happens in the field. It comes to ask a hypothetical question: what should happen in the field? What would happen if all the actors acted rationally? All the agents, right, all the actors acted rationally—what would happen then? The question what actually happens in the field is a descriptive question. Check and see what happens in the field.

In economics there is room for such an approach—not everyone shares it, very few actually share it—but in game theory there is more. In game theory, because game theory is considered a branch of mathematics as opposed to economics, which is supposed to describe what happens in the world—in game theory, true, people claim it has uses; in my opinion they’re mistaken, but that’s what they claim—game theory as a philosophical branch doesn’t really speak at all about the question of what happens in the world. It speaks about the question of what happens in an ideal world, what happens in a world where every person acts fully rationally. Then I can describe to you what will happen and what ought to be done and what is worthwhile to do and what is the most rational way to act given such-and-such a game with such-and-such agents. What will happen on the ground? On the ground there are all kinds of people acting in all kinds of ways. That’s a question for psychologists, not a question for mathematicians. Mathematicians are not supposed to describe what people do. Mathematicians are supposed to describe ideas, logical derivations of some ideas from others. Therefore this has nothing to do with it at all. Game theory is a branch of mathematics; it is not a branch meant to describe the world. What is meant to describe the world is economics or psychology or a combination of the two.

Someone who wants to use game theory as an auxiliary tool for economic analysis—that’s another matter. He really has to ask himself whether it’s actually correct to assume that all the people acting here are acting rationally, and then I can apply game theory; because if not, then game theory is not the right instrument to apply. But that doesn’t mean game theory is incorrect. Game theory as a mathematical branch is always correct; it is correct by definition. When you ask whether it describes the world, that is no longer a question in game theory. It is already a descriptive question—does it describe what happens? And here the answer is: not always. Sometimes it doesn’t describe what happens.

I say the same thing here. When I ask what philosophy is, I’m not asking what people call philosophy. I’m asking what people ought to call philosophy, what people who understand ought to call philosophy. Now, of course, at that point I no longer need people. So let’s skip over the people and ask what ought to be called philosophy. Why do I care about the people? A person who won’t act that way I’ll simply say doesn’t understand. A person who does act that way I’ll say understands. So practically speaking, I don’t need the people; the people are only an incidental route. I ask what philosophy is—but not what people call philosophy. The second question is descriptive; the first is essential. And the essential question is a philosophical question.

Now, Rabbi, how does Aharoni define the difference between these two kinds of questions? Again? How does Aharoni define the difference between these two types of questions? In other words, where is the line? Why don’t we conduct a survey, say, on whether two plus two is four? The question whether two plus two equals four—throughout the whole book he sees that as an observational question, but not observation of people. Observation of objects. Take two objects, add another two, and see what you get. You count—you get four. So the answer is four; I don’t care what people say. If people say otherwise, then they’re wrong. It’s an observational question, but not observation of people; rather observation of the facts themselves. But the question “What is philosophy?” is a question about what a concept is, and a concept in essence is this—according to him. I claim there is such a thing as observing the concept of philosophy, the idea of philosophy. And he doesn’t accept such a thing. In his world there is no such thing. So for him, what remains is observing people.

It’s a bit funny, though, because you also have to define the things you’re asking people to observe. What is addition? What does it mean to add two things in reality? Well, I don’t understand. You define the concept for people. You tell them what addition is. What’s the problem? That’s a definition. But how do you define the concept? Do you ask them also to observe? Like in mathematics. What’s the problem? I don’t understand. You define the concept of addition in a certain way, as is accepted in mathematics. Fine, everyone agrees to that. There’s no problem with that. Then I ask: if you apply the operation we just defined, addition, to two and three, what will the result be? Here there is no need to ask people; I simply look and see five. For him, mathematics is an observational science—he repeats that all the time. I also argued with him about that a bit. I disagree with him completely. Mathematics has nothing to do with observation in any way. But that belongs to the same dispute. For him, anything that isn’t observation is invention, decision, as he calls it. But I don’t agree. No, I didn’t say addition isn’t necessary in reality. I said that applying the operation of addition to reality is a claim in physics, not in mathematics. That’s a different claim. No. Fine, in any case that answers the question in the chat here.

Okay, I want to move on now and summarize what he basically wants to argue. I’ll do it in his own words. This is the summary; I took it from his book. The summary is this: all this can be summed up in two statements. A: looking at another is not philosophy. And B: proper self-investigation resembles in every respect the investigation of another. These are really his two assumptions. Meaning, if I look at another person or another object—not myself—that’s science. It’s a descriptive question, and basically science. It’s not philosophy. Second claim: when I look at myself, and I do it properly, I need to perform estrangement, in my terms. What does that mean? I have to treat myself as though I were someone else, and then in effect it’s like looking at another. Therefore this too is a scientific question. It’s a descriptive scientific question, except that this time the creature I am looking at is me and not someone else. But it is still the product of observation; it’s a descriptive claim. There is nothing philosophical here.

And now he continues and says the following. These are his two assumptions, basically; this is the foundation of the whole book. Now he says: to prove my definition of philosophy, I undertake to show that every philosophical problem disappears or ceases to be philosophical when it is shifted to another person. Meaning, when he takes a philosophical issue—and this is what he does throughout the book, with all the philosophical issues—he takes a philosophical issue and shows that there is some kind of human reflection on oneself here, and now what he is supposed to do is the following. This is what he calls the transformation of detachment. Let us now place Reuven in place of myself when I am reflecting on myself. Let’s put Reuven there, not me. And let’s see what we get now. What happened to the philosophical question when it was reformulated? Originally it was formulated as my looking at myself. Now let’s take the sentence in which I refer to myself and put Reuven in place of myself. I refer to Reuven. And now let’s ask: okay, what is this question now with Reuven? He says, I promise you one of two things will happen. First possibility: the question loses its meaning; it becomes nonsense, it becomes absurd. That’s what happens in archetypal problems. Second possibility: the question turns from a philosophical question into a scientific, descriptive one. That’s what happens in non-archetypal problems. Never mind his terminology for now. That’s it. He says: all the philosophical issues on earth include human self-reference. If you put someone else in place of the person himself and ask what the question now says when reformulated about another person, you’ll see either that it says nothing, or that it becomes a descriptive question. Philosophy disappears.

So what is he really saying? That even if I don’t put someone else in place of myself, the philosophical feeling is still an illusory feeling. Why? Because even when I refer to myself I have to perform estrangement. Again, I’m translating him into my terminology, but that’s basically what he means. I have to perform estrangement, and once I perform estrangement, the “I” on which I am looking—the I as object, not as subject—for him, that is someone else. What difference does it make whether I’m looking at myself or at someone else? As long as I make sure that the reflection on myself is done from the outside. Meaning, I see myself as a person at whom I am looking; in this case, myself. Doesn’t matter. It’s still a descriptive question in every respect. For example, if I ask myself how much I weigh, that is no different from asking how much you weigh. I answer it the same way: I step on a scale and see how much I weigh. And to answer how much you weigh, I put you on a scale and see how much you weigh. So there is nothing special when I ask that question about myself rather than someone else. His claim is that this is true of all philosophical questions. But to show it, instead of performing estrangement, just replace yourself with someone else and see whether any philosophical question remains. That is what he says: I undertake to show that in no philosophical issue does it remain a philosophical question after you apply to it the transformation of detachment. That is his claim.

Now here I want to make several comments already. First: even if we grant, suppose he is right—he succeeds in showing that in all philosophical issues, if I perform the transformation of detachment, the question either loses its meaning or turns into a descriptive scientific question—does that mean there is no philosophy? My answer is no, it does not mean that. Why not? Because when I look at myself and do not perform the transformation of detachment, it may still be that the question is philosophical. For example, when I ask myself how I think. Okay? Of course I can treat that as a descriptive question: I can simply see how I solve a problem in mathematics and document how I thought. That really is similar to documenting the action of someone else. There isn’t much difference. But when I look at the processes of thinking—not what I wrote on the page, but the processes of thought from within—there it’s no longer, even if you call it observation, sensory observation; it is not observation in the way scientific observation is done. And therefore there it can certainly fall under a philosophical definition, especially as I defined it earlier: observation by the eyes of the intellect, intuitive observation of some concept that is not accessible to sensory observation.

So even if he were right that the transformation of detachment eliminates all philosophical questions, I’m not sure that would already prove that there is no philosophy in the world. Because if you performed the transformation of detachment, then yes, it became an observational descriptive question. But I am not performing the transformation of detachment; I’m asking the question about myself, not about someone else. And my claim is that questions about myself are sometimes descriptive questions, but not always. Not always can someone else replace me. We’ll see examples later and then it will be clearer.

Okay. So now I want to enter a bit into the content of the book. Up to this point this was really the preface and the conceptual framework. He talks a lot about circularity; he devotes a chapter to it, to circularity, and he tries to show that all paradoxes—the liar paradox is built from a sentence that refers to itself. Now of course, if that sentence referred to another sentence, it would not be paradoxical. Does that solve any problem? Obviously not. The whole point is that when a sentence refers to itself, it is paradoxical. So what help is the transformation of detachment if I place another sentence in place of the sentence itself? I’ll say that other sentence is false. Right? That won’t create any paradox. So what? But my claim is that self-reference really does create paradox. More than that, as I’ve said not once before, self-reference—showing that there is self-reference—that’s not enough. It’s obvious that self-referential things can create paradoxes. The question is whether every self-reference is by its very nature paradoxical, as he wants to claim. I don’t agree with that.

The examples he gives, such as a flashlight that illuminates itself or an eye that sees itself—those are unsuccessful examples in my view. Why? Because in principle there is no obstacle to a flashlight illuminating itself. The obstacle is not logical; the obstacle is physical. Physics is simply structured in such a way that a flashlight cannot illuminate itself. Rays go outward from it. But that is a physical constraint, not a logical one. There is no principled logical problem if someone invented a flashlight that illuminates itself. If rays of light moved not in straight lines but in circles, okay? And there are spaces where that does happen—in curved space it also happens, yes, according to general relativity. Then the flashlight would illuminate itself. There is no problem in that at all. Likewise, the eye could see itself. I’m not talking through a mirror, of course. But an eye could see itself. The only reason an eye can’t see itself is simply because that’s how it is built. That is a physical constraint, but there is nothing essential here.

To infer from this that when I think with my tools of thought about my thinking, that is paradoxical—that’s what he wants to claim—why? Maybe our thinking is structured in such a way that it can refer to itself, unlike a flashlight or an eye. There is no logical principle here that forbids it. Rather, with a flashlight and an eye, their structure really is such that they cannot illuminate themselves or see themselves. But that doesn’t mean every self-reference is by definition paradoxical. He keeps returning to that same mistake, each time from a different direction. And as I’ve shown more than once, it’s just not true. There are self-references that are not paradoxical, like the sentence “Every sentence is made of words.” It too is made of words, and there is nothing paradoxical about that. It refers to itself. Right? What’s the problem? Everything is fine. Therefore it is not true that the moment you reveal self-reference—boom, now we have a paradox. No, absolutely not.

So that’s regarding paradoxes. In other words, if I show that self-reference lies at the foundation of a philosophical question, but this is a self-reference that does not lead to paradox—suppose you succeeded in showing that—but it is not the kind of self-reference that leads to paradox, then what’s the problem? It is still a fully legitimate question within a defined field, a well-defined philosophical field. Even if we grant that he would succeed in showing that the whole field is basically self-references. He won’t succeed in showing that. But even if he did succeed, his critique is simply incorrect. It is based on assumptions that, in my opinion, are simply not true.

Okay, let’s now enter into the philosophical questions themselves. Basically he has four fundamental problems. These are the first four chapters of the body of the book. They deal with four basic problems. The first problem is the problem of idealism or nominalism, if you will: is there an external world, or is it all just imagination and illusion? The next questions are: what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true? Ethics, aesthetics, and logic. Those are the next three issues. But let’s start with the first question.

At first glance, that first question—whether there is an external world—let’s think for a moment without Aharoni and without the transformation of detachment and all that he’s trying to say. On the face of it, every one of us would say that this is a full-fledged philosophical question. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I’m troubled by the question. Personally I’m not troubled by it. I think there is an external world. But I’m not troubled by it simply because I have an answer to it, not because the question is ill-defined, not because the question has no content or is contradictory or defective, nonsense. No. It’s a perfectly well-defined question, a very good question. It’s just that I think I have a sufficient answer to it. There is an external world; the answer is yes, there is an external world. Therefore I’m not troubled by it—but not because it is undefined.

Ron Aharoni tries to argue that this question is philosophical, and therefore it is not defined at all. And he argues that it is not defined because there is self-reference here. Now notice: on the face of it, what does this have to do with self-reference? The question whether there is an external world or not—what does that have to do with self-reference? If anything, I’m relating to what is outside me, to the world. And the question is whether there is such a thing or not. It’s a question about it, about the world out there. What does that have to do with me? Okay? So this is the first issue he tries to deal with.

Maybe I’ll add one more sentence: how do I actually answer it according to my own view? How do I answer it? I keep proposing my alternative definition of what philosophy is, to set it side by side with his conception. So in my view, the answer to this question is of course not an observational answer. Everyone agrees that I see a table here. That is not the philosophical question—whether I see a table. To that, the answer is a descriptive scientific answer: yes, I see a table. That is not a philosophical question. The philosophical question is whether what I see actually exists. That is the philosophical question. In other words, is my seeing reliable? Not whether I see, but whether I see and whether that seeing really reflects something real. That is the philosophical question. And here I have no scientific way to answer it. Because how can I check whether this thing is an illusion or real? I can observe the table not through my own eyes and see whether I see a table, but maybe that observation too is an illusion. The moment you say that all our senses are really generating only illusions and do not actually describe something going on in the world itself, you have turned this question into a non-scientific one, not a descriptive one. There is no scientific way to answer it. And in that very move, it becomes a philosophical question.

How do we answer it? I claim we answer it through intuitive observation, not observation with the eyes. My intuition tells me that what my eyes show me is indeed reliable, that it really is there somewhere in the world itself. Okay? That is an answer I give myself by means of my intuition. Therefore it is a philosophical question and a philosophical answer, not a scientific one. That is my claim.

Now let’s see how he attacks this. And what he says—I’ll share the passage. Here, this is a quote from him. But in fact, by formulating the question that way, haven’t you turned it into self-reference? Meaning, when you ask whether what I see really exists, that’s the self-reference, no? No, I’m not asking whether what I see really exists. I’m asking whether there is a world outside. What I see is only the reference point. I’m not asking about the reliability of my senses. I’m asking whether there is a world outside. The way to answer that is to say my senses are reliable, and therefore I think there is a world outside. But the question itself has nothing to do with me. It asks whether there is something there regardless of me. And here it seems this is exactly the focal point where I disagree with him.

So look, I shared the quoted passage from him. He says this: “This question depends entirely on the fact that a person asks it about himself. Detachment turns it into something ridiculous. Is the whole world Reuven’s dream? That is a tasteless question. In this case, not only does the feeling of philosophicity disappear under detachment, but the whole problem itself. This means that the problem has no real content and no existence of its own. It is nothing but the setting up of the circular structure and a declaration about the paradoxicality born from it.”

What is he really saying? This question of solipsism, right? The idealist question, the one that says: is the whole world my hallucination? Now, if I perform the transformation of detachment—remember? that’s his way of diagnosing issues—then let’s now perform the transformation of detachment. Let’s put Reuven in place of myself. Now I ask: is this world, or the whole world, Reuven’s dream, not mine? And that question is not merely a scientific question; it is a meaningless question, a ridiculous question—it disappears. In that sense this is an archetypal problem. Why? Because after the transformation of detachment the question is emptied of content; not that it becomes a scientific instead of a philosophical question, but that it vanishes, evaporates.

So why? Why does it evaporate? Because clearly the whole point of the question is whether I am living in an illusion. What does it mean whether Reuven is living in an illusion? I don’t experience Reuven’s illusion. That’s his claim, and therefore the transformation of detachment removes the question. Why is he wrong? The point is this—I’ll answer on several levels.

First, I don’t agree that once I perform the transformation of detachment the question really disappears. Can’t I ask whether the world Reuven sees is his illusion? It’s not relevant whether the world I see is Reuven’s illusion—that certainly it is not. But the same question I ask about myself I can ask about Reuven too. So that part, I think, he could deal with. Why? Because in the transformation of detachment, what we are supposed to do is place Reuven in place of the self, not in place of the I. Right? I relate to myself. Now if I put Reuven in place of both the I and the self, that is still self-reference. To perform the transformation of detachment I have to put Reuven in place of the self, not in place of the I. Then basically I ask whether the world that I see is Reuven’s dream. That is what the transformation of detachment yields, if you do it the way he defines it. And that, of course, is a meaningless question. The world I see is certainly not Reuven’s illusion; at most it might be my illusion, not Reuven’s. Okay? So once the transformation of detachment is carried out, the question disappears.

And because—I remind you of his two assumptions—and because my relation to myself is supposed to be as if the self were someone else, in effect one needs to perform estrangement, which is like the transformation of detachment. Only I’m doing the detachment within myself from the I; I don’t need another person—another person is just to make it more concrete. But if you understand that the self here too plays the role of someone else, then you understand that estrangement is simply the transformation of detachment. So he is effectively saying: once I treat myself as someone else, I can’t ask whether the world is my self’s dream. Because the observing I is not the self at which I am looking, the self to which I refer. I am I, and my self is like Reuven. It doesn’t matter that in this case it happens to be my own self. I’m supposed to treat myself as another person, an object upon which I as subject observe. Okay? That’s really his argument.

But now—I say this: so suppose we performed the transformation of detachment, and he’s right, that when I insert Reuven only in place of the self, not of the I but only of the self, then the question is emptied of content. But why does that prove that if I do not perform the transformation of detachment, and I do ask about my illusions, the question lacks content too? Why do you say that this question is also contentless? Why does the transformation of detachment necessarily imply that the question is emptied of content? It is emptied of content if you indeed perform the transformation of detachment. But if you do not perform it, and I ask whether the world is my illusion without inserting Reuven in place of the self, then the question remains a good question, one that should be thought about and answered. What’s the problem?

True, there is self-reference here, so I’ll perform estrangement. But even if I perform estrangement, I cannot ignore the fact that the self—even if I’m looking at myself from outside—the self is the same person as the I. So I’m looking at my illusions, as it were, from outside. Fine. But they are still my illusions. Why, who said that this question disappears? That it is meaningless? So I simply do not accept that relating to myself is always exactly the same as performing the transformation of detachment. In other words, estrangement is not detachment. When I relate to myself, then yes, in order to define the relation I need to see myself from the outside, define that reflection as though I were looking at myself as someone else. But I cannot ignore the fact that this “someone else” is, in this case, me. The act of relating has to be carried out as though two different people were involved. But in the background, clearly, I remember that this is myself, and I know my own feelings. So I cannot ignore, and need not ignore, that fact. Therefore this is a completely legitimate question. Estrangement is not detachment, in other words. Contrary to what he wants to claim—that is his second assumption. I remind you of the summary we made. His second assumption was that observing myself is exactly like observing someone else, as long as I make sure to perform estrangement. Answer: not true. Estrangement is not detachment. It is not the same thing.

And therefore I say: even if when you relate to someone else the philosophical question disappears, that does not mean that when you relate to yourself it also doesn’t exist. No. That’s simply not true. That is a second remark.

Another remark I want to make here is that he presents the question in the following formulation: is the whole world my dream or my illusion? Then he says: if I had inserted Reuven here it would lose meaning. Is the whole world Reuven’s illusion? The world I see is Reuven’s illusion? Meaningless. But I think that isn’t the question. The question is, as one of you remarked earlier: is there a world outside? Not: is what I see an illusion? The question whether what I see is an illusion is a derivative question. I ask the question: is there a world outside? That’s all. Does a world exist? Is there a table? It has nothing to do with me at all. Even if I don’t exist, what difference does it make? I ask whether the table exists. That’s it. Then someone may come and say: okay, but you see a table, so how can it be that it doesn’t exist? And then I’ll answer: it may be that what I see is an illusion. But to present the question as an epistemic question of cognition—whether what I see is an illusion or genuine sight—that is how he presents it. That’s not right. It is an ontic question, not an epistemic one. A question about what exists in the world, not about what I am looking at. The epistemic question is a derivative question. After I arrive at the conclusion, or present the thesis, that outside there is no world, it does not exist—then when the question arises, okay, so what am I seeing? The answer is: what I’m seeing is an illusion. But the question is not whether what I’m seeing is an illusion or not. That is not the basic question; it is a derivative one. The basic question is whether there is a table. And that is a question about the table. What does that have to do with me?

Therefore I absolutely do not agree that the transformation of detachment would evaporate this question. It absolutely would not evaporate this question. I ask the question whether there is a table. Try to perform the transformation of detachment. What will you substitute? I do not appear in the question, my self does not appear there, and there is no place to put Reuven. Therefore I think that in this case I also don’t agree that one can even perform a transformation of detachment on this question at all. It’s simply not true.

Okay. Now I want to move on to his next questions—what he says about the good, the true, and the beautiful. So here, let me show you the relevant passages. Here he speaks about the good. “What is good?” becomes, when viewed from the side, the question “What are Reuven’s moral values or standards of justice, and what are the values of Israeli society today?” These are wholly descriptive questions that evoke no feeling of philosophicity at all. The problem of defining the good does not disappear when it is attributed to another, but it ceases to be philosophical. This means that it was not born from the absence of separation, and it has content of its own beyond the anguish of the fear of losing one’s foothold. Only its feeling of philosophicity was born from the identification of investigator and investigated.

So unlike the previous question—which is an archetypal question, because the transformation of detachment eliminates it—this question is a non-archetypal one. Why? Because the transformation of detachment does not eliminate it. The question what counts as good in Reuven’s eyes, or what counts as good in the eyes of Israeli society, are meaningful questions. Good questions, and one should think about them or investigate them. What disappears here is their philosophical dimension. They simply become descriptive questions, not philosophical questions. But they are not emptied entirely of content. In that sense, this is unlike the question whether there is a world outside, whether the world is my illusion, where once I perform the transformation of detachment the question disappears altogether—not that it turns from a philosophical to a scientific question. Here, the question turns from a philosophical to a scientific question.

I want to describe, in sociology or anthropology, how Israeli society sees certain acts. What is considered good and what is not considered good in that society. That is a question for science—anthropology or sociology or whatever you want. What does that have to do with philosophy? But again, he has performed the transformation of detachment. Instead of asking what is good in my eyes, let’s ask what is good in Reuven’s eyes. Once you ask that, what’s the problem? Ask Reuven, or see how he behaves, or do one observation or another, and answer the question. It is a descriptive scientific question. So the transformation of detachment turns the question from a philosophical one into a scientific one; it doesn’t eliminate it. Therefore it is a non-archetypal question.

He says the same thing about the beautiful. “What is beautiful?”—that too is a question about values, and its fate under separation is similar. It becomes: what are the standards of beauty of a particular society or a particular person? And these are descriptive questions in which there is not even a trace of philosophicity. Yes, same thing with “What is truth?” This is basically ethics, aesthetics, and logic, the three foundational fields of philosophy. “What is truth?” becomes, under separation, “How do human beings—or even the questioner himself—use the concept of truth?” Here too, “the questioner himself” of course means once he carefully maintains a separation between the investigator and the investigated. In this problem too, there remains real content after the separation, but the feeling of philosophicity disappears. Therefore this too is a non-archetypal problem. It ceases to be a philosophical problem and becomes a descriptive scientific problem. It does not disappear, unlike the first question we described.

And these three problems, which are really the foundational problems of ethics, aesthetics, and logic, become observational questions, descriptive questions.

Now here too, I want to show you that in exactly the same way I can refute his argument. The claim is: suppose I ask the question what is good in my eyes. That is the question of what the good is, yes? Now I perform the transformation of detachment. Let’s ask what is good in Reuven’s eyes. And the question what is good in Reuven’s eyes is an observational question. Simply ask Reuven or see how he behaves. And once the transformation of detachment turns it into a scientific descriptive question, that means that even if I ask the question about myself it isn’t a philosophical question, because reflecting on myself is like reflecting on someone else, right? That’s his assumption. And I deny that. Because when I ask the question what is good in my eyes, by what method will I answer it? Will you examine my instincts? Will I examine… will I observe myself to see how I behave or how I think? Or will I simply think? I won’t observe how I think; I’ll simply think.

If this reminds you of my criticism of his analysis of the question “What is philosophy?”, that’s no accident. It’s exactly the same thing. After all, he is basically conducting a survey, right? He asks what is good in Reuven’s eyes or in the eyes of Israeli society or something like that. Now ask each one of the respondents: when he answers that survey question, how does he answer it? On what basis does he answer it? Does he also conduct observations? He doesn’t conduct observations. He simply answers.

Now I ask: by what criterion does he answer? Is murder good or not good? So he says: murder is bad. Fine. Now I have made an observation; I understand that the question what is good does not include murder. Murder is not included in the good. How do I know? Because I conducted a survey, so it’s descriptive. I conducted a survey and saw that they all answer negatively, that murder is not good. And I ask: how did they answer me? You see, this is exactly the same as my dispute with him over the question “What is philosophy?” In other words, how did they themselves answer me? Not how I answer myself after conducting a survey—how do they answer the survey? What do they look at? Themselves, to see how they think? So he himself enters into self-reference. No—they simply think. They do not look at themselves to see how they… They observe with the eyes of the intellect or with their intuition, their moral intuition in this case, and answer: this is good and this is not good, and that’s all. So whatever they do, you can do too. Therefore I do not accept that once I perform the transformation of detachment and it becomes a descriptive question, that uproots the content also of the question when it is asked about me. Because even the question after I have turned it into a descriptive one—that descriptiveness is from my standpoint. When I ask what is moral in your eyes, I am of course only describing. You have to make decisions, and I summarize your decisions and then can report what is moral in your eyes. But when you answer yourself what is moral, you won’t do descriptive observational work. You’ll have to make an ethical judgment. And that is philosophical work.

Therefore there is no reason that I myself should not answer that question in exactly the same way. Or, to put it differently, my question even regarding Reuven is not what is moral in Reuven’s eyes. That’s simply nonsense. Because if the basic question is also not what is moral in my eyes—the basic question is: what is moral? Period. Not in my eyes. What is moral? And of course I will activate my intuitions in order to answer that. So naturally, when I answer it, I answer it by means of my own tools. But one must not get confused: the question is not what is moral in my eyes, but what is moral? Once I reach that conclusion, I demand it of you too, not only of myself. So what if I reach that conclusion using my own tools? And if the question is what is moral and not what is moral in my eyes, then what relevance does the transformation of detachment have?

I’ll phrase it another way. Understand: this is exactly parallel to the analysis I gave of the example “What is philosophy?”, which is why I discussed it there. When I ask the question about myself, I’m not asking at all what is moral in my eyes. I’m asking what ought to be moral in my eyes. What is worthy of being moral in my eyes. That is the real question. Suppose murder seems moral to me; then I am wrong, because it ought not seem moral to me. I am not asking an empirical descriptive question—what do my instincts tell me about morality. Instincts may perhaps be a tool for grasping what morality is, but that is not the question. It is not a descriptive question of how my instincts work. The question is what morality is. I can use my moral instincts in order to answer it, but the question is not what my instincts say; the question is what morality is. You see? Just like with the external world—exactly the same criticism.

And now if I transfer this—if I perform the transformation of detachment and ask what morality is—where exactly do I put Reuven in my place? I can put him in my place and say: what ought to be moral in Reuven’s eyes, if you like. But then the question, of course, does not disappear and does not become descriptive. Because if Reuven tells me that what is moral in his eyes is murder, I’ll tell him: wrong. What ought to be moral in your eyes is not murder. You see, again—I have an argument with him. And if everything he says is the basis of my definition, how can I have an argument with him? Or how can I criticize him? He is simply missing the question.

The question is not what seems moral to me or what seems moral to Reuven. The question is what ought to seem moral to me, or what morality is. Same thing. And here, if you perform the transformation of detachment, it changes nothing. Not only does it not eliminate the question, it also does not turn it from a philosophical into a scientific question—it remains philosophical. When I ask what ought to be moral in Reuven’s eyes, the tool for answering that is not observational. It is the same tool as answering what ought to be moral in my eyes. There is no difference at all. Because what is moral in my eyes also ought to be moral in Reuven’s eyes. There is no difference between us. Therefore, with a philosophical question, the transformation of detachment does nothing.

Notice that my critique of him is basically double, perhaps triple. First, I do not think the transformation of detachment really eliminates the philosophical question. Once the question is a philosophical question, no transformation of detachment will eliminate it. And here I brought his most central examples, and I can show this for all his questions. Second, even if the transformation of detachment does eliminate the question or turn it into a descriptive scientific question, that still does not prove that the original question before the transformation of detachment was not a philosophical question. If I ask it about someone else and it becomes descriptive, so what? It may still be that the question with respect to me is philosophical. Okay?

So I think I’ll stop here, but I think this discussion is an excellent demonstration of, first, the importance of estrangement, but also of its limits. Estrangement does not actually turn me into someone else. I’m supposed to relate to myself as if I were someone else, but not forget that this someone else is me. Or not know what I myself know just because I’m relating to myself as if I were someone else. Am I supposed to close my eyes and not know what I think? Of course not. What kind of nonsense is that? I know what I think. Therefore he takes estrangement one step too far.

I do not agree, I do not agree that if you perform detachment, that is the same as estrangement. So then even without detachment it’s basically the same thing. No. Estrangement and detachment are not the same. Even where detachment would dissolve the philosophicity, estrangement does not dissolve the philosophicity. And besides, detachment also does not actually dissolve the philosophicity. When you define the question properly, detachment too does not dissolve the philosophicity. So I disagree with him all along the line. A single such disagreement is enough for me to say his critique is incorrect, but I disagree all along the line; I do not agree with what he says.

Okay, this was just a somewhat more detailed illustration of the meaning of referring to myself—what it is and what it is not. Estrangement, detachment, what is the difference between me and another? I’m supposed to relate to myself as another, but still remember that I really am me. Now after that—the end of the philosophical introduction to the matter. After the holidays, when we meet—after Sukkot, the first Thursday after Sukkot, whenever that comes out, I don’t know, there’ll be a message—then I’ll enter into halakhic issues. And there too we’ll basically see similar tensions, similar questions. Okay.

Comments or questions or whatever you want. Yes, can I? Can I ask? Yes, yes. There are people who reject both estrangement and detachment, because I’m not entirely clear on the difference between estrangement and detachment. If someone comes and says I don’t accept either estrangement or detachment, I can somehow understand that, that both those things have to… For example, I can love myself, right? But in order to define properly that relation between me and myself, I can’t say “I love I,” but “I love myself.” And that linguistic expression reflects the fact that the I as loved object and the loving I are playing two different roles here: I as subject and I as object. That is estrangement. Why do I say estrangement is not detachment? Because I still do not ignore the fact that the object to which I relate is me. I don’t think that I am someone else. I am me. But it is true that in order to define properly the relation between me and myself, I need to perform an act of estrangement. So the question is how far you take it. I showed places where you must not take it. In the end we say that the I is dual. What does dual mean? I’m not claiming there is ontological duality. I’m not claiming there is split personality and that I am two people. I’m saying that when I speak about a relation between me and myself, in order to define that relation properly, I need to be aware that the I and the self play a role as though they were two human beings, and as though I were relating to myself from the outside. But it’s “as though.” It’s not that in reality I can now be replaced by someone else and it would be the same. No, it wouldn’t be the same.

Wait, Rabbi—if it’s only “as though,” then let’s cancel it. Let’s… No, you can’t cancel it, because then the relation isn’t defined. We brought many examples of this. The relation cannot be defined if you don’t perform this estrangement. It is an intellectual act. It is not a metaphysical act. It is not that in reality there are now two different people, the I and the self. But on the intellectual level, in order to define the relation correctly, you need to define it between I and self, not between I and I. But that intellectual definition isn’t disconnected from reality. Reality is dual. If I accept reality as it is, then I accept it all the way. Come, let’s look at me, okay? I am my father’s son and my son’s father. So am I two people? No. But there are two ways of relating to me even though I’m one person. From my father’s point of view he sees me as the son; from my son’s point of view he sees me as the father. Am I two people because of that? No. But on the other hand it is clear that I am functioning here in two different ways relative to two different points of view. That doesn’t mean there are two people in reality, but it does mean that to define the relations properly you have to understand how I play a role relative to the point of view in question. And also in my relation to myself, I have to understand that from my point of view as subject, I grasp myself as object as if I were someone else. That doesn’t mean I really am someone else, but that’s how I’m supposed to relate to myself; otherwise the relation is a recipe for disaster and will create problems.

Wait, in other words the Rabbi is saying these are different sides of the I? Different parts of the I? There is the I. There are two different ways of relating to the I, and that’s basically two attributes of the I. I don’t know exactly whether it’s two different attributes; maybe you can call it that. I prefer to define it as two different modes of relation. In the end, practically speaking, are there two or is there one? Yes, but I’m saying they are two different modes of relation. One or two? I don’t know what “one” means there, but I don’t accept this move of saying “as if two.” I’m saying again: there aren’t two I’s, there is one. But there are sometimes two different ways of relating to the same person. What’s the problem? It’s like the father and son example I gave earlier. That’s all. In order to define the relation properly, one has to make sure there are two different forms of relation here. Often it is convenient to describe it as though there were two people here. And that is the transformation of detachment that he performs—but it’s only “as though.” He loses the “as though.” For him it’s not “as though”; it’s really two people. Now there are not two people. Even he agrees there aren’t two people. I think there are, I think that… Why? There aren’t two people. What do you mean? I actually could accept your telling me there are two I’s and that’s it, I’d go with it. You could also accept that I’m Napoleon. That’s called split personality, or paranoid schizophrenia, whatever. Fine. Neither of those is true; they do not correctly grasp reality. There is one person. He has several modes of relation, several appearances relative to different perspectives. Anyone else?

Okay then—may you all be inscribed and sealed for good, have a good year, a joyful festival, happy holidays. After the holidays, with God’s help, we’ll meet on Thursday. Goodbye. Have a peaceful Sabbath.