Learning from Experience – Lesson 1
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Opening the series and the methodological orientation
- Rationalism versus rationality, and the example of the pigeons and jaundice
- The question of the medical mechanism and systematic testing
- The distinction between criticism of rational thinking and the rationality of people and politics
- The historical background: the rule of rationalism in antiquity and the example of Aristotle
- The rise of criticism in the 15th century and the parallel to criticism of pilpul
- The formation of empiricism and modern science: Bacon and inductive logic
- Descartes as a rationalist rear-guard battle: the cogito and the attempt to justify observation
- British empiricism and the slide into skepticism: Locke, Hume, Berkeley
- The post-Hume crisis and Kant: science works without philosophical justification
- The proposed solution: intuition as intellectual observation and the “eyes of the intellect”
- Closing the introduction, Popper, Yitzhak Ben Israel’s book, and the question of will and miracle
Summary
General Overview
The text opens a series on learning from experience and, by way of introduction, lays out a philosophical-historical framework for the clash between rationalism and empiricism. It argues that rationalism is not the same as rationality, and that automatically rejecting evidence just because it does not fit current understanding is an irrational kind of rigidity. It describes the rise of empiricism and the success of modern science alongside the crisis of its philosophical justification in Hume and Berkeley, and presents a proposed solution through intuition as “intellectual observation,” or the “eyes of the intellect,” in Maimonides’ language. It concludes by arguing that science relies not only on the senses but also on principles grasped through intuition, and that one must distinguish between criticism of the tools of thought and criticism of people’s rationality and their biases.
Opening the Series and the Methodological Orientation
The speaker opens a new series on learning from experience and plans later to do another series on statistics, with points of contact but as a different topic. He states his intention to give a conceptual philosophical introduction, bring general examples as well as examples from Jewish law, and examine connections between the fields.
Rationalism versus Rationality, and the Example of the Pigeons and Jaundice
The speaker distinguishes between rationalism as a philosophical view that learns about the world through the intellect, and rationality as sensible conduct in examining claims. He tells about someone who suffered from jaundice for a long period, about treatment by a witch using pigeons placed on the navel that died one after another, and about the rapid retreat of the illness afterward, arguing that such a correlation requires investigation and should not be dismissed out of hand. He presents his parents’ reaction as an example of extreme rationalism that is not rational because it refuses to accept reports that contradict existing conceptions, and warns that if scientists had clung to that approach, science would have remained at its primitive stage. He adds that scientific conservatism is reasonable, but excessive conservatism produces mistakes and rigidity.
The Question of the Medical Mechanism and Systematic Testing
The speaker responds to a gastroenterologist who argues that recovery from acute hepatitis after some time is unsurprising, and stresses that the point is the timing and the correlation, not recovery itself. He argues that one should not immediately conclude that pigeons heal, but that a serious investigation should be conducted before forming a position, and gives as an example the possibility that unexpected phenomena, such as the effect of fungi on bacteria, would never have been discovered without openness to evidence. He cites a claim he read in the name of Rabbi Tau, according to which the mechanism of the pigeons’ death is suffocation and there is no real medical effect, and he notes past uses of this in Meir Hospital, though he does not draw a factual conclusion on the matter.
The Distinction Between Criticism of Rational Thinking and the Rationality of People and Politics
The speaker refers to a political example involving the gas agreement with Lebanon and the split between right- and left-wing positions, and distinguishes between undermining rational thought as a tool and the claim that people in practice are not rational because of interests. He adds that the division is not absolute, mentions criticism in Haaretz of the agreement, and argues that such issues have advantages and disadvantages that allow each side to latch onto different arguments.
The Historical Background: the Rule of Rationalism in Antiquity and the Example of Aristotle
The speaker explains that in antiquity and until the end of the Middle Ages, the balance tilted toward rationalism over empiricism, and emphasizes that this distinction is not between rationality and mysticism but between two philosophical modes of cognition. He presents Aristotle as an example of deriving conclusions about the world from logic without experiment, such as the claim that a heavy stone falls faster, and explains that the simple experiment that would refute this was not done because “why do I need a verse? Logic itself says it.” He clarifies that Aristotle did make observations and classifications and served as a father of science, but also saw the intellect as a tool for understanding the world, and therefore where something seemed self-evident to him, he refrained from experimentation.
The Rise of Criticism in the 15th Century and the Parallel to Criticism of Pilpul
The speaker describes how in the 15th century criticism began to develop against rationalism and against the view that the intellect is a central means, or even any legitimate means at all, for knowing the world. He proposes a historical similarity to the debate over pilpul in Torah study in the same period, where “intellectual towers in the air” are built without checking them against halakhic facts, and he mentions Pygmalion as an image of falling in love with an intellectual creation that is never actually tested.
The Formation of Empiricism and Modern Science: Bacon and Inductive Logic
The speaker describes the development of an empiricist view according to which only observation and experience can give knowledge about the world, and in extreme versions the intellect is not a tool for understanding the world at all. He presents Francis Bacon as an attempt to develop a logic that would accompany inference from experience—not Aristotelian deductive logic, but inductive and analogical logic. He describes modern science as relying more and more on observation and abandoning hypotheses whose source is the intellect alone, while recognizing standards that require experimental grounding even for things that seem logical.
Descartes as a Rationalist Rear-Guard Battle: the Cogito and the Attempt to Justify Observation
The speaker places Descartes at the turn of the late 16th and early 17th centuries as a scientist and mathematician, yet also a devout rationalist who fought the empiricist attack in order to save the possibility of learning about the world through the intellect. He explains that Descartes’ methodological doubt seeks to isolate one thing that cannot be doubted, namely the very act of doubting, which leads to the cogito ergo sum. He argues that Descartes and Anselm tried to build logically certain arguments without basic premises in order to arrive at factual claims about the world, but that the exercise failed, and adds that Descartes even tried to ground trust in the senses and in observation on a rationalist basis through the existence of God and the faculties of cognition.
British Empiricism and the Slide into Skepticism: Locke, Hume, Berkeley
The speaker describes the flourishing of empiricism, especially in the British Isles, in Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, alongside the progress of science and the separation of disciplines between philosophy and the sciences. He argues that taking extreme empiricism seriously leads to the conclusion that very little can be known from experience, and that Hume undermines induction and causality, showing that many principles in scientific work are not learned from observation but are assumed a priori. He explains that Hume arrives at deep skepticism because faithful empiricism leaves us only with directly observed facts and undermines generalizations and theories, while Berkeley goes further and argues that there is no justification even for trusting the senses, developing an idealism in which “facts” are inner phenomena without an external world.
The Post-Hume Crisis and Kant: Science Works Without Philosophical Justification
The speaker argues that after the empiricist move is completed, it becomes clear that science succeeds and proves itself, but has no philosophical justification within extreme empiricism, and this is the crisis Kant points to when he says that Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. He describes the tension as a “short blanket” between rationalism and empiricism that cannot cover both head and feet together. He presents Kant’s proposal that science deals with the world as it appears to us (phenomena) and not with the world in itself (noumena), and adds a critique of Kant, namely that there is no justification for assuming a noumenon and that it is not clear how the forms of the intellect are supposed to filter observations so that they fit perceived laws of nature.
The Proposed Solution: Intuition as Intellectual Observation and the “Eyes of the Intellect”
The speaker proposes blurring the dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism through mediating capacities between thought and cognition, and he calls this intuition. He argues that intuition is not a logical derivation from previous thoughts and is not sensory observation, but rather intellectual cognition in which the intellect grasps structures, laws, and principles in the world, similar to the “eyes of the intellect” in Maimonides and the “logic of hearing” of Rabbi HaNazir, and he mentions that Husserl also uses similar expressions. He argues that principles such as causality and induction are products of intellectual observation and not of pure thought, and that even the axioms of mathematics are grasped through intellectual “seeing” rather than experiment; therefore the world “knows” how to behave in accordance with mathematics because the axioms are absorbed as cognition about the nature of the world.
Closing the Introduction, Popper, Yitzhak Ben Israel’s Book, and the Question of Will and Miracle
The speaker concludes that justifying science requires recognizing that observations are not only sensory but also intuitive-intellectual, and that the non-observational principles in science rest on intellectual observation. He notes that science recognizes that its knowledge is conditional and open to refutation, as Popper says, yet still makes claims about the nature of the world as long as they have not been refuted, and the philosophical question is what justifies that. He mentions that he bought the book Does the World Really Exist? A Scientific-Philosophical Journey from Kant to Quantum by Yitzhak Ben Israel and refers listeners to a column he wrote on his website. He responds to a question about the effect of will on intuition and about the possibility of living with a consciousness that “everything is miracle,” in the style of Nachmanides, and distinguishes between the claim that there is no truth and the claim that human biases distort vision, concluding that a critical perspective will lead to the recognition that there are laws of nature in the world and that “the world follows its natural course.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, we’re starting a new series now. A series on learning from experience. Later on I was thinking of doing another series on statistics, which is related to the issue—there will be points of contact—but it’s still a somewhat different topic. We’ll see what I do with those interfaces. But in any case, right now I want to talk a bit about learning from experience. As usual, I want to give some sort of general conceptual philosophical introduction, get into a few examples, both in general and also in Jewish law, and see whether there’s a connection between the different areas, yes, the way we usually do in these series. Okay, so I’ll start with the more general conceptual-philosophical introduction. Basically, throughout the history of philosophy there has been, I would say, an ongoing confrontation or an ongoing debate between two conceptions of how we learn things about the world. One conception is the rationalist conception, rationalism. This is a conception that basically says we learn things about the world by means of the intellect. That’s called rationalism. And again, I’ll sharpen the point: there’s a difference between rationalism and rationality. They’re not the same thing. Both conceptions are rational, but one is rationalist and the other is empiricist. Yes, the example I usually use to show the difference between rationalism and rationality is—yes, this is a story I’ve already told—about someone who studied in our yeshiva, today he’s a well-known figure, and he had jaundice for quite a long time. As I recall, something like half a year or even more. It didn’t go away, the story didn’t pass. He was hospitalized a bit, at home a bit, didn’t come to the yeshiva for a long time. At some point, some mutual friend who was there told me that some witch had come to him, a young woman with pigeons, she put them on his belly button, the pigeons died one after another, and within a few days he came back to the yeshiva. Meaning, the jaundice started to recede, and eventually it passed. Yes, the correlation looked very striking with the pigeons, after half a year when nothing was moving—or I don’t know, a long period, maybe half a year, but a long period when nothing was moving. So when I got home to my parents, I told them about this, and they threw up their hands—what is this dark yeshiva doing to their beloved son? Yes, I’m talking here about Gush Etzion, not Ponevezh or I don’t know, Vizhnitz Yeshiva. And the claim was that they were frying my brain, I was starting to believe in all kinds of superstitions and mysticism and dark things of that kind. So I told them I don’t really understand their rationality—or their rationalism, it’s not the same thing—because as far as I’m concerned, a rational person, if he hears testimony about the occurrence of some event or phenomenon that he can’t explain, doesn’t understand, doesn’t sound logical to him, he shouldn’t reject that testimony out of hand, but rather check very carefully whether the witness is in fact reliable, whether he saw what he says he saw, and if so, then it may be that what I think is wrong, and I need to reexamine some of my assumptions, because there’s some phenomenon here that I don’t know how to explain and it’s probably real. And if, from this rational outlook, yes, I keep rejecting every report of a phenomenon I don’t understand, or a phenomenon that seems strange to me, then obviously I’ll never learn anything new in my life. Meaning, I’ll end my life with the same insights I came into the world with, because anything that doesn’t fit them I simply won’t accept. So don’t confuse me with facts, as they say. And let’s say if the greatest scientists in history had adopted this rationalism, we’d still be today with the developed science of Adam, the first man, more or less. And therefore, in my view, rationality דווקא demands that I carefully examine the testimony, and if the testimony seems reliable, then think again about what’s wrong with my current conceptions—meaning, where am I mistaken. The difference between these two approaches, yes—my parents’ and mine—I think that’s the difference between rationalism and rationality, or being rationalist and being rational. Rational means behaving logically. Rationalism means behavior that clings to the intellect, to insights, and isn’t willing to accept what doesn’t seem logical or doesn’t seem understandable to me. Now, rationalism isn’t necessarily rational. On the contrary: in excessive rationalism it’s not rational, because excessive rationalism is basically sticking to what seems logical to me and refusing to accept supposedly non-rational reports, yes, reports that don’t fit with my conceptions. And then of course that’s just intellectual blindness or intellectual rigidity, and it won’t allow me to examine myself critically and change my conceptions. Therefore, rationalism of this sort is very irrational. I’m not dismissing…
[Speaker B] Rabbi, I just don’t understand the example the rabbi brought. As a gastroenterologist, I know that jaundice and hepatitis—most acute hepatitis cases pass; it’s a matter of time. Obviously, if they had checked what type of jaundice it was, the fact that it passed wouldn’t be surprising. To think that this happened through some strange mechanism where pigeons die and that affects the bilirubin in the blood sounds really strange.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, it really does sound strange, I completely agree. The only question is: what do you want to infer from that—that it isn’t true?
[Speaker B] I’m saying that almost all acute hepatitis cases pass after a certain amount of time. The jaundice passes after a certain amount of time, depending on the type—A, E, B, C—so half a year is not especially unusual.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—what do you mean, not unusual?
[Speaker B] Actually, I actually remember the wonderful example the rabbi brought about the accident with the eight children, where just the opposite—the rabbi didn’t rely on a miracle and didn’t…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that’s something else, we’ll get to that too, but that’s something else. You’re missing an important point here. For half a year nothing was moving, and the moment the pigeons arrived it suddenly receded. This correlation, of course, is not necessary—nothing is necessary. Whoever isn’t speaking, please go back to mute. This correlation—even if it doesn’t lead to a necessary conclusion—I don’t think it can be brushed aside lightly. It should definitely make me think that maybe what I know about hepatitis, of whatever kind, is not correct, maybe it’s not precise. Maybe pigeons really do have some effect on these things. If I reject everything unfamiliar to me, as I said before, I’ll stay with the science or the medicine of Adam, the first man. So in my view this approach is very illogical. I’m not saying pigeons do it. I’m saying this requires serious investigation before one forms a position on whether it works or doesn’t work. That’s all.
[Speaker C] Who could ever have known that fungi affect bacteria?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? I didn’t catch that.
[Speaker C] Who could ever even have imagined that fungi have some effect on bacteria?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, to this day I still don’t imagine that, I don’t know. But fine, yes, all sorts of phenomena that people didn’t know in the past—if they hadn’t been willing to accept the testimony about them, then we would have stayed with what they knew then and we wouldn’t have… yes, exactly, today I saw some reference to Semmelweis. Maybe we’ll talk about that later, one of the next times, about the clinging to what’s familiar. We do have a tendency to cling to what’s familiar, and that tendency is not groundless. Meaning, I don’t think it’s right to dismiss it. But you have to be careful not to cling too much. In other words, yes, to be open to changes, not to be absolutely attached to the familiar. Scientific conservatism has some logic to it. Excessive scientific conservatism is a sure recipe for mistakes and rigidities. Okay, anyway… So the claim is basically that rationalism as a philosophical position is not the same thing as rationality, which is a description of a mode of conduct, or decision-making, or thinking, or whatever. And it’s not the same thing. In other words, attachment to the intellect is some kind of—call it character or a philosophical outlook or whatever—but it is not parallel to rationality. And therefore this distinction is a very important distinction. When I speak about rationalism as a philosophical position, I’m speaking about rationalism and not about rationality. Because rationality—everyone, almost everyone—claims the crown of rationality, and it’s also hard to define. Rationalism is a particular philosophical conception. It’s a conception that says I can learn about the world through the intellect. I’ll sharpen that a bit more in a moment. Opposed to it stands a conception called empiricism. Empirical means learning from experience, from observation. And empiricism basically claims that it is impossible to learn about the world except from observations, from experience. The intellect is not a tool for knowledge of the world—that is basically the empiricist claim. And in that sense I want to sharpen something a bit, even though I’m jumping ahead a little, but just to make the concepts precise. Rationalism does not claim that one does not learn about the world from experience, or that it is impossible to learn about the world from experience. Rather, it claims that one can also learn about the world by means of the intellect. It does not claim exclusivity for the intellect. It claims that the intellect too is a tool for understanding the world. Empiricism claims that the intellect is not a tool for understanding the world—only experience is a tool for understanding the world. So there is a certain asymmetry in the dispute between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism says that the intellect too is a means; empiricism says that only experience is a means of understanding the world. So there is some asymmetry here that is important to remember, but it is at the center of the discussion. We’ll get to it in more detail in a moment.
[Speaker D] But an empiricist also always uses the intellect to draw a conclusion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He uses the intellect, but he doesn’t see it as a tool for understanding the world.
[Speaker D] But without intellect he can’t understand anything from what he…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Without breakfast you can’t do it either, because if you’re hungry and die of hunger you also won’t be able to. But breakfast is not a tool for understanding the world. In a moment I’ll sharpen that a little more. So I want to begin with a kind of historical look, which I’ve given in the past—I don’t remember in what context. A historical look at this confrontation between rationalism and empiricism. In earlier periods, in antiquity, what ruled the roost was rationalism. Rationalism not as opposed to mysticism or as opposed to religiosity, but as opposed to empiricism. I’m speaking only in the philosophical context. For me, rationalism is the antithesis of empiricism. Not rationality as opposed to mysticism or irrational thinking or whatever—that also existed in abundance in antiquity, I’m not trying to deny that. Rather, in the sense of rationalism versus empiricism, the balance weighed very clearly in favor of rationalism. What does that mean? The basic claim or approach was—Aristotle is perhaps the clearest example, though of course not the only one—and his enormous influence lasted basically until the end of the Middle Ages. The idea was essentially that we learn about the world by means of our intellect. So if Aristotle wants to know—this is my favorite example, not mine but a worn-out example—about two stones, one weighing one kilogram and one weighing ten kilograms, which one will fall faster to the ground? If we leave them in the air and let them fall, which one will reach the ground faster? He doesn’t bother doing an experiment and checking. Rather he says, logically, in his head, the heavier stone falls faster. Therefore it’s obvious it will reach the ground earlier. The truth is that this is not correct. The truth is that they fall at exactly the same speed, with the same acceleration and therefore also the same speed. And to do this experiment you don’t need a nuclear reactor or a sophisticated particle accelerator. What you need is to take two stones, go up to the first or second floor of some building or something like that, and drop them. Leave them in the air and see which one reaches the ground first. A very, very simple experiment. If Aristotle had bothered to do this, he would have discovered that he was talking nonsense. But he didn’t bother to do it. Why? Because it was clear to him logically that the heavier stone falls faster, and what do I need a verse for if logic itself says so, right? I have a clear logical intuition, so why do I need to run an experiment? Now, just to avoid misunderstanding: Aristotle did use experience. Aristotle certainly was one of the fathers of science, including modern science. He did check, he made observations, he made classifications, taxonomy—he definitely was a person, and by the way many of the great rationalists, including Descartes for example, were men of observational science. But still, their philosophical conception was a rationalist conception. In what sense? In the sense that they too regarded the intellect as a means of understanding the world—not only the intellect, but also the intellect. But obviously, where, let’s say, I don’t have a logical intuition, where the intellect doesn’t tell me what will happen in this situation, then I’ll use observation. Meaning, yes, there’s a short question.
[Speaker B] I’ve always wondered how it could be that a person as talented and brilliant as Aristotle came up with all kinds of ideas that are so detached. I don’t know, it seems to me he claimed that swans grow on trees, and like the wonderful example the rabbi just gave. What does that mean—a smart person? You don’t have to be the genius of the generation to open your eyes once and see that two stones fall together. Isn’t this a clear example that we know what we want to know, and that rationality is very, very precarious?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It has nothing at all to do with genius, nothing at all to do with genius. Meaning, if something seems very clear to you and you’re a rationalist, then that’s probably reality. Why would you bother doing an experiment on something that is self-evident? He didn’t bother to do it, and that was no flaw in his wisdom. He was presumably a wise man. It’s simply an outlook that says: what do I need a verse for if logic itself says so? If it’s clear to me logically, why do I need experiments? I know. What’s the problem? It’s like: do I need to run experiments to check that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees? No. I have a proof for that, and therefore it’s clear to me that it’s true. By the way, I’ve never measured it in any experiment, but I’m sure that’s what will come out if I do measure it. Because it’s clear to me that it’s true. True, here I have a mathematical proof, but still, at the conceptual level, what seems self-evident to us we won’t go out and check. And therefore, in my eyes, it’s not such a puzzling thing that Aristotle didn’t bother to check the matter. I’m saying: where it was clear to him logically or intellectually that this was the situation—in places where his intellect was not decisive and he didn’t know what was going on, he certainly did use observations. All of us are like that, by the way. You yourself earlier, you yourself earlier hesitated about this story of the jaundice. Now someone comes and brings you a fact. You say, forget it, I’m not looking at the facts, it’s not true. I reject it out of hand. That’s exactly Aristotle’s rationalism.
[Speaker B] No, I didn’t say I reject it. I said I know that in terms of a simple medical mechanism, a person is generally supposed to recover after half a year.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Supposed to recover, but the correlation with the time when they put the pigeons on him—that cries out for explanation. I didn’t bring the proof from the fact that he recovered. The fact that he recovered is obvious. Rather, from the fact that this happened exactly after half a year in which nothing moved, it happened exactly together with putting the pigeons on his belly button. That is something that should make me think. Again, I’m not getting into what conclusions follow from it, but it’s definitely something that should make me think and not cause me to reject things out of hand. By the way, I think I mentioned this—once I read some article by Rabbi Tau. Rabbi Tau apparently checked this in a systematic way, at least according to him, and he claims it’s nonsense. He says it’s foolishness. He argues that pigeons have some sort of air opening in the back, and when you press them against the belly button it simply suffocates them, and that’s why they die. But why do people get better? Coincidence. Meaning, okay, at some point they recover, and it’s coincidence. In other words, when you test it systematically—apparently with a sample group and a control group and double-blind and everything you’re supposed to do in a scientific experiment—then according to him you do not discover a significant effect of the pigeons on curing jaundice. I haven’t checked it. I do know that in the past there were also doctors who used this. I know that, for example, Meir Hospital used it. I know this from people who… saw it. Meaning, doctors in Meir Hospital used this thing. I don’t think today it exists anywhere, in any case I haven’t heard of it. So it seems to me that at some stage they already checked it and realized it wasn’t true, but honestly I don’t know. That’s my impression, I didn’t check, I don’t have information. Okay, and to our topic: I’m only saying that from the mere fact that someone brings me information of this kind, I’m not supposed to reject it out of hand, but rather I should think: what’s the explanation? What could it be? Is it true? And if it is true, then how does it work? Meaning, being rational does not mean being rationalist. Rather, it means accepting the truth from whoever says it, and afterward trying to explain rationally why this thing works, or trying to find the rational explanation for why it works. Anyway, to our matter—so we were with Aristotle. So Aristotle, as I said earlier, certainly uses observation. But where the intellect told him something that seemed self-evident or completely clear, he didn’t bother doing an experiment. And the truth is, we’re also like that. To this day many people are like that, including scientists, including everyone. The difference is that we are more and more aware that the intellect can mislead. We have errors and mistakes, and sometimes our intellect tells us something very clearly—still, it’s worth checking it in experience, if possible at least, and seeing whether it really is so or not. So in that sense we’ve accumulated experience about how our intellect works; that too is a conclusion from experience. And it’s a conclusion from experience that says that even if our intellect tells us something very, very clearly, it can still mislead us. It isn’t always true, and it’s always worth checking things empirically. Standards have even developed for this, yes—that you don’t just state things from logical intuition. If you want to make a scientific claim, it has to be anchored in experience. Even if it seems terribly self-evident and terribly logical to you, it has to pass some experimental tests before this thing is approved for use, let’s say as a medication or a medical procedure or whatever. The fact that it sounds logical to you is not enough. In any case, all of this is made up of conclusions that were drawn over the course of history, and experience is of course part of this and everything, but it’s not trivial, it’s not self-evident. To this day people, when their intellect tells them something, tend not to accept facts that contradict it. They tend to say that those facts probably aren’t correct. And maybe sometimes they really aren’t, but again—it’s a question of dosage. Okay, anyway.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, can I push just a little more? Can I try just a bit more to undermine rationality?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For a second?
[Speaker B] With something contemporary, some current example that really impresses me. You know, the rabbi knows—the agreement with Lebanon, the gas, the whole story. My impression is that 100 percent—maybe 99.9 percent—of right-wing supporters oppose the agreement and find in it every flaw in the world, and the opposite in the other camp. And you stand there amazed: these are rational people, and this one is a Middle East expert and that one is a Middle East expert, this one is a security person and that one is a security person. And somehow the fault line between the two opinions is divided around the political interests of the two sides, which are obvious. Doesn’t that undermine all rationality and turn the whole thing into something so conditioned by interests that you have to suspect it from the moment it comes into existence?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here I need to make another distinction, since you raised it. There is a distinction between criticism of rational thinking and criticism of the rationality of people. Those are really not the same thing. Someone who uses rational thinking—I think that’s the tool, a very important tool, sometimes the only one we have—to undermine it is a mistake. Someone who claims that people are rational people and that they operate with this tool—that’s not so rational, or at least it doesn’t acknowledge the facts. So when you bring this example, at most you can infer from it that people do not behave rationally. That is not a criticism of rational thinking; it is a criticism of people who do not make use of it. And by the way, that correlation isn’t quite as precise as what you said earlier. Right now I saw—not for the first time—harsh criticism in the newspaper Haaretz of this agreement. Haaretz definitely does not belong to the right-wing camp.
[Speaker B] Gontazh is the only one who says the same opinion all the time? That same Gontazh who said this opinion from the beginning, with very flimsy arguments, at least in my view.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not only Gontazh, others too. There is criticism, there is harsh criticism of this agreement. I saw someone serious today. Gontazh’s article was already a while ago.
[Speaker C] It’s like Dan Ariely says, just…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For example. I’m saying it’s not so simple. In politics you can get the impression, yes, this one says this and that one shouts that, because each has an interest. By the way, in this context it’s also clear that this agreement has advantages and disadvantages, right? That’s clear to all of us. So obviously someone who wants to support it has something to latch onto, and someone who wants to… Returning to our topic, Aristotle in fact belonged to the rationalist side, yes, rationalist in terms of his philosophical outlook, but that’s because he was willing to use the intellect for understanding the world, not because he said that only the intellect is a means of understanding the world. That’s an important point. Okay, that’s what ruled the roost until, say, the end of the Middle Ages. Aristotle and his derivatives and continuers, and at some point he got the stamp of approval of the Church. אצלנו, with Maimonides, yes, he got religious stamps of approval; among Muslims, among Jews, among Christians—he became sacred and it was forbidden to disagree with him. At the beginning—toward the end of the Middle Ages, the beginning of the modern era, the 15th going into the 16th century—various challenges to the rationalist conception began to develop. The conception that says the intellect is the central means, or even any means at all, for understanding the world. This too went through various nuances. At first the question was whether it was the central means; afterward the question was whether it was any legitimate means at all for understanding the world. And in the 15th century philosophical criticism of rationalism began to arise. By the way, personally I tend to think—I don’t know whether it was a zeitgeist or an actual conscious influence—but it’s very similar to the debate over pilpul in the context of Torah study, which also arose in the 15th century. The debate over pilpul, because there too pilpul is a kind of construction of intellectual castles in the air, and the criticism of pilpul is: test it against the facts. The facts in that case are the halakhic facts. You build a very beautiful tower in the air, but it doesn’t really hold water. Meaning, there are contradictions from here and contradictions from there, and you have difficulties. You don’t bother checking your structure because you’re in love with the creation, yes, with the creation that you created. Yes, what’s it called? What’s his name? The one who fell in love with the statue he created. It slipped my mind, something with a P. You know? Okay, never mind.
[Speaker B] Who is that, who is that? The guy there?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] fell in love with the statue he created in Greek mythology. It slipped my mind, doesn’t matter. Okay, the story is well known. Okay, so these are people who fall in love with the products of their own spirit, with the products of their own intellect, and aren’t willing to test them against facts. And that too was, to a certain extent, the criticism of pilpul, and the criticism of rationalism in the broader philosophical-scientific context; both happened in the 15th century. There are lots of interesting parallels. Pygmalion, exactly. Lots of interesting parallels. Anyway, following that criticism that arose in the 15th century, a philosophical view developed called empiricism, which says that in order to know something about the world we necessarily need observation. In its extreme formulations, the claim is that the intellect is not a tool for knowing the world at all. Not just that it’s important to use observation, not just that observation is the main thing—observation is the only thing there is. Like they always say, money isn’t the main thing, money is the only thing. So here too, in this context, it’s the same. And in the 16th century things began to develop—say, toward the end of the 16th century, modern science begins to develop. And Bacon, Francis Bacon, with his empirical logic, tries to build a logic that will accompany our inference from experience, from observation. Not logic in Aristotle’s sense, deductive logic, but inductive logic or a logic of analogies, a logic that accompanies scientific inference, inference from experience, from observations, from facts. That too develops in the 16th and 17th centuries. And of course modern science, which gradually bases itself more and more on observations and leaves behind all the rationalist hypotheses, the hypotheses that emerge from the intellect. At the transitional point more or less—the end of the 16th century, the beginning of the 17th—there stands, for example, someone like, a thinker like Descartes. On the one hand Descartes was a mathematician—yes, Descartes’ Cartesian coordinate system is still used today; Cartesius is Descartes, yes, a Cartesian coordinate system is simply named after him. And he was a scientist and philosopher and mathematician; in that period there still weren’t clear distinctions, whoever dealt with wisdom dealt with all these fields. But he was a devout rationalist in his philosophical outlook, and French, right Eliav? I already said that when I talk about the French I mean 20th-century Frenchmen, not before that—there were a few normal people there too, sorry to our friends here, there are a few more here. Anyway, so Descartes was a rationalist, and in that framework I think people don’t sufficiently know the background to the formation of Descartes’ philosophical doctrine. Yes, the cogito principle, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, which is perceived as some kind of foundation on which he built his proofs for the existence of God. First I prove that I exist, and after that I can prove that God exists, and so on. So all that is true, but there’s something more fundamental here on the methodological level that underlies this whole move. Basically Descartes was fighting, fighting a kind of rear-guard battle, yes, a final heroic battle against the empiricist attack, even though he himself was also a man of science. But he fought against the empiricist attack and wanted to save rationalism. And to save rationalism means to save the possibility of learning about the world by means of the intellect. Not to save the claim that only by means of the intellect do we learn about the world, because he was a scientist and used experience and observation too. And again I keep returning to this because it’s important. But he was already confronting the cruder, harsher attacks that said you can’t learn about the world through the intellect at all, only through observation, okay? And he tried to show: not true, there are things I can learn about the world through the intellect. And his move, basically, was: let’s try to clean things out—yes, the move, Descartes’ methodological doubt, methodic doubt. Basically, let’s cast doubt on everything on earth and see what we are left with. Is there anything with which we can attain absolute certainty that it exists? What does absolute certainty mean? That we have a proof from within itself that this thing exists, that this thing is true. Okay, so the claim is that if you clear away everything about which you have doubt, in the end there is one thing you won’t be able to doubt, and that is that there is someone who is doubting—and that’s you. In other words, if you are doubting, you cannot deny that there is an act of doubting here, meaning that there is someone here who is doubting. And because of that, you can conclude that this is not vulnerable to the attacks of skeptics or empiricists or whatever else. The proof of my own existence I can establish without resorting to observation, from pure thought. And then on that basis he tries to build the existence of God and all sorts of other things. By the way, in the end he builds observation on that too, but maybe we’ll get to that later. Now this move of Descartes basically came when things were already at their peak. Rationalism was in serious retreat in the face of a scientific-philosophical attack, and Descartes tries to save it. And the cogito argument is basically his attempt to cling to the horns of the rationalist altar, to show that with the intellect one can reach claims about the world. For example, that I exist—that’s a claim about the world. So there you have it: by purely intellectual means I can reach a conclusion about the world. Yes, Anselm is another example—the ontological proof for the existence of God. These are all kinds of arguments that try to reach a factual claim about the world without observations, but from the intellect alone. In the context of the cogito and in the context of Anselm’s ontological argument, they make an even more radical move. They try to show that I can learn about the world by means of certain logical means that require no foundational assumptions. That’s what’s called an ontological proof: conceptual analysis alone. Because understand, I can, for example, learn things about the world on the basis of my assumptions, and those assumptions are rationalist assumptions, meaning from the intellect, not from observation. But from them I can infer conclusions about the world. Those conclusions won’t be certain, of course, because they depend on assumptions, and the assumptions themselves may or may not be true. So that isn’t inferring a conclusion about the world by logical means alone, but it is by intellectual means alone. Therefore it’s not the same thing. Anselm and Descartes tried to present a logical argument that leads to a conclusion with certainty, meaning you don’t need foundational assumptions at all. Not from observation and not from any other source. You need no assumptions whatsoever. It’s a kind of hocus-pocus that produces a claim, some conclusion, without grounding it in assumptions at all. A kind of logical trick. That trick failed. It failed in both cases; I don’t think it could succeed. But that was basically Descartes’ attempt. It was an attempt to defend rationalism. Later, as I said earlier, he even grounded empiricism and my trust in science and observation on rationalism too. After I know that I exist, and that God exists and implanted in me tools of thought and cognition and so on, now I can also trust the senses. So now I can also accept my observations. From his point of view, observation is derivative; empiricism is possible only on a rationalist basis. Rationalism is the basis on which one can build our trust in observations, in empiricism. Okay, that is basically the claim, yes. Descartes’ proof of my existence is a proof for the existence of my intellect, of my thinking. Not of my legs, or my stomach, or my head. Of my thinking. In certain respects he proved the existence of spirit, and he claims that this is also the basis for recognizing the existence of matter—as opposed to what people usually think, that matter is obviously what exists, while spirit is what’s debated, whether we are materialists or not. Descartes said it’s simply the opposite, logically. Spirit certainly exists. Whether matter exists or not is the debate against the idealists. But spirit certainly exists; spirit is what knows matter, and if I don’t accept the existence of spirit then matter doesn’t exist either. Anyway, for our purposes, Descartes basically tried to save rationalism and show constructively that I can learn things, infer claims about the world, by intellectual means alone, without observation. That was basically the Cartesian project, his philosophical project. Now after him, he suffered a defeat—a colossal defeat, I would say. Not that everyone is totally clear about what the problem with the cogito is, but everyone is clear that there is a problem with the cogito. I have a column about this on the site; I won’t get into it here. In any case, de facto in the scientific and philosophical world a revolution took place in the 16th century, and human thought moved fairly quickly from rationalism to empiricism, and even to extreme empiricism. Extreme empiricism means that only observation is the tool for knowing the world, not the intellect. Not that observation is needed, not that observation is important—only observation. Meaning, the intellect is not a tool for knowing the world. In order to know the world you need to observe it. What you think—who says that what you think describes what actually happens? If you have experience, if you can observe things, then okay, that’s a reasonable basis for making claims about the world. But the fact that you think something seems logical to you—so it seems logical to you. So what? As long as you haven’t tested it, it says nothing about the world. Right? Mark Twain, whom I’m fond of, said the world owes you nothing; it was here before you. The fact that you think in a certain way does not mean that that is what actually happens in reality. Reality owes you nothing. So that’s the rationalist conception—sorry, the empiricist one—that somehow conquered its place or took the place of rationalism. But the process didn’t stop there. It went on, and following the rationalist revolution—actually mainly in the British Isles—there was a flourishing of empiricist philosophy. Yes? The three prominent British figures are Locke, Hume, and Berkeley. Okay? They are basically the three central British empiricists who developed the empiricist philosophical doctrine. They were mainly philosophers, by the way, not scientists. By that period the distinction between philosophers and scientists had already begun to emerge. In the 17th and 18th centuries the disciplines start to separate, and they were mainly philosophers. But alongside them, of course, empirical science advanced in larger and larger strides together with empiricist philosophy. But then empiricist philosophy, in Hume, and perhaps Berkeley too, reaches a dead end.
[Speaker C] Because—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] because when you take empiricism to the extreme, meaning you really believe it all the way through—only experience is a tool for knowing the world, not the intellect—you gradually discover that there are very few things we can really learn from experience, if anything at all. And therefore all kinds of doubts that Hume raises about induction, causality, and so on—Hume basically raises a difficult question about many, many things that maybe Locke and those before him thought we learn from experience, and Hume basically exposed that at their foundation stand various principles that were not learned from experience, but are principles we assume, like the principle of causality, induction, space and time, all kinds of different things that affect scientific thought. And somehow scientists are convinced that they are simply engaged in pure observation, and many times they don’t notice how many a priori insights are embedded within their scientific work. They are sure they are only dealing with pure observation, but absolutely not. In other words, already in the 17th and 18th centuries, the British empiricists notice this, and gradually—with Locke he was very optimistic, he built a very beautiful empirical conception, divided the world into categories, and somehow really built a rich, varied, apparently well-founded empiricist philosophy; everything is wonderful. But then Hume and Berkeley begin digging into Locke’s doctrine and discover more and more principles that Locke treats as some kind of result of observation, but which are actually a priori assumptions that he had assumed. And then Hume basically tries to throw out more and more things that are not purely observational. Because remember, pure observationalism says the intellect is not a tool for knowing the world, only observation. Now what things can I know only on the basis of observation? Very little. Only facts that I observed directly. No generalization, nothing that I infer from one thing to another—all those sorts of inferences, this or that, are already work of the head, of the intellect. If you want to stick to observation and be a straight, loyal, and extreme empiricist, you’re left with very few granular facts and that’s it; you’re left with no science at all. And in that sense… Hume, from within his empiricism, arrived at a very deep skepticism. That seems to many people like a contradiction—to be skeptical, to believe in science, in observation, and so on—sorry, to be rationalist, to be rationalist, not rationalist, empiricist, who believes in science and observation and progress and the like and in learning from experience and all that; it doesn’t sit so well with the image of a skeptic. A skeptic is a philosopher; the scientist is supposedly the opposite of a skeptic. But no. Hume showed that precisely empiricism leads to skepticism. And why? Because if you take empiricism all the way, you are left only with the things you observed directly. About everything else you are supposed to be skeptical. So he’s not skeptical about his observations, but he is skeptical about everything else. And gradually he discovers that “everything else” is not a small amount. In other words, the observations where you can know that you saw them with your own eyes are very few things. Most things that belong even to science are not things that you saw with your eyes, or that anyone even saw with their eyes—not just you personally, but anyone at all. These are scientific inferences, theories that we build, all kinds of things of that sort. All these are acts of the intellect. And if the intellect is not a tool for knowing the world, says Hume, then who says there is any substance to any of it? Just hallucinations. Berkeley takes this one step further and leaves us with a total vacuum. Because Berkeley basically says that even our trust in the senses has no observational justification. Empiricism itself is not justified. Who says your eyes reflect reality correctly, or your ears, or touch—yes, all the senses? Who told you that? Maybe there is an evil deceiver, yes, Descartes’ demon, or hallucinations, or who says there is any reality at all? And Berkeley built what is called an idealist doctrine, which does not recognize the existence of an external world—which is even stranger to connect with an empiricist doctrine. And Berkeley was an empiricist. But from within his empiricism he understood that even the pure facts about which Hume did not cast doubt—basically even those cannot be accepted. Because who says they are true? Who says that what you observe is really what is happening? And therefore Berkeley’s claim is that what we call observation is simply an encounter with phenomena that exist within us inwardly. Within us, or within him personally inwardly—I don’t know whether he believed in the existence of other people; I don’t know what the justification for that would be. Basically only he exists, and all experiences and other people and other objects and the world—these are all basically things that exist within his own thought or cognition inwardly. And therefore what we call facts and observations and all of that actually concerns us, inwardly; there is no external world. And that is the result of Berkeley’s empiricist doctrine. He was an empiricist. Precisely because he was an empiricist, and he demanded a kind of certainty, something tangible, yes, something I can get my hands on, in what I believe—he suddenly understands that even “getting your hands on it” isn’t good enough. You can’t say anything about that. All you can say is: I see such and such. You can’t say that such and such exists in the world. And then science is basically dealing with my inner experiences. There is no world. So is that empiricism or rationalism? You can call it empiricism, but by then the difference between that and rationalism becomes very blurred. So Berkeley is really the completion of the move that takes us from rationalism to empiricism into some kind of vacuum that returns us to rationalism. But it returns us to such a thin rationalism, because ordinary rationalism held that with the intellect we know the world. Yes, it believed in the existence of an external world and said that the intellect is a tool for knowing the world, the world’s conduct, the objects in the world, and so on. Berkeley, after the empiricist move, basically returns to rationalism, but it is a rationalism that is turned inward, not outward. The intellect is a tool for knowing the “world,” in quotation marks—the world meaning the world of my experiences, because there is no world outside. So it is a return to rationalism, but in a much thinner, more limited form—yes, much, much more skeptical, let’s call it that. And in that sense, after the British empiricists complete the crystallization of the empiricist philosophical doctrine, we basically stand before a dead end. Because it’s clear to everyone that science—which by that stage was definitely progressing—has real substance; it’s an instrument that works, it’s a good instrument, it proves itself. You can’t say that in this way I am not learning about the world and that this is not being done much better than Aristotle did in his time with his rationalist methods. In other words, people developed trust in science, but there was no philosophical justification for it. That is basically the crisis before which Kant stood after Hume. That is what Kant meant when he said that Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Yes, Hume essentially sharpened for him the dead end before which scientific thought stands. Because on the one hand it is clear to us that science succeeds and works and has real substance, and somehow trust in science is self-evident. But when you ask yourself what the philosophical justification for this is, there is none. Because a rationalist justification for trust in science is not enough; science is observational, it doesn’t believe in using the intellect to know the world. And observation has no real justification, and it also gives us almost nothing, and as Berkeley says, who says we are observing anything at all? And Kant too, in this matter, made a kind of turn with the relation between phenomena and noumena; I’m not going into those details right now. So this break basically opens up what we might call not new thought but modern thought. The modern era begins in the 16th century; more modern thought, I think, begins somewhere around Kant, where things really become more crystallized, and from there on everyone understands that there is some kind of short blanket here. The game between empiricism and rationalism is basically a game of a short blanket: the question is whether to cover your head with it or cover your feet, but you can’t cover both. Meaning, you won’t succeed in giving a complete, orderly rationalist doctrine; you won’t succeed in giving a complete empiricist doctrine. And basically there is something here that somehow seems unjustified. It works, it’s impressive, we trust it, but it has no justification, and that is very frustrating, at least to philosophers. Scientists keep charging ahead; they’re not interested in any of this. But philosophers are very troubled by it.
[Speaker C] What stops philosophers from saying both and both? What—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does “both and both” mean? That both—
[Speaker C] both the intellect and experience… what—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does it mean, both the intellect and experience? Because the intellect cannot be a tool for knowing the world. That’s the lesson of the empiricist criticism. Because if I think in a certain way, why should that obligate the world to behave that way? Since my patterns of thought are planted in me for various reasons—they didn’t yet talk about evolution, but never mind—planted in me for some reason by the very fact of my birth. How do I know that there is some correlation or fit between the ways I think and the way the world behaves? There is no justification for that. And observation itself doesn’t give me that. Observation gives me, at most, particular facts; according to Berkeley, not even that. So there is something here that cannot be justified. Science contains non-observational components, but philosophically we have reached the conclusion that anything non-observational cannot yield a claim about the world; we cannot accept it as a basis for a claim about the world. So how can one believe in science and at the same time understand that it can’t have a basis? There is a very real dissonance here. That’s what I’m saying. “To the same degree”—well then, the claim is—and I answered the question here—from this point on various conceptions develop that don’t really give an answer to this question. The only one who tried to present a truly systematic answer to this question, I think—others try, but really with rather feeble attempts—was Kant. Kant tried to give some sort of answer to this question. First of all he formulated it—that is Hume’s dead end—and then he tried to give it some sort of response with the synthetic a priori; we talked about that in one of the—I don’t remember—which previous series. With the synthetic a priori and transcendental arguments. No, that’s not important right now; if someone doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter so much. But Kant tried to give some sort of answer that, in brief—I will say it briefly—basically what he tried to argue is that we are not dealing with the world itself when we talk about science. Scientific laws and scientific insights do not deal with the world itself, but with the world as it appears to us. Not the noumenon, which is the world as it is in itself, but the phenomenon, the phenomena, the way we perceive reality, not reality itself. And then he says that if so, then yes, one can understand why the intellect can give me knowledge of the world, because the world in question is not really the external world, but is also located inside my head. Fine, so the intellect can know itself, and in that sense perhaps one can trust intellectual tools, mental tools, when they tell me things about the world, because it’s not about the world; it’s about the world as I perceive it. This isn’t exactly Berkeley, because Berkeley thought there is no world, while Kant thought there is a world. He just claimed that the characteristics of the world, our insights about the world, the properties of the world, are all formulated in our subjective language. And therefore science, which deals with them, is actually dealing with things formulated in a subjective language, but they make claims about the world itself—not like Berkeley, who thought there is no world at all and all claims concern what is happening inside me. Kant thought there is a world, and the claims concern the world itself, only they are formulated in a language that is mine, in forms of thought and concepts drawn from my world. Many people, in my opinion, are mistaken about this in their interpretation of Kant. I wrote a few columns about that too, but again, these are details that are less important for us here. So that is Kant’s proposal. I don’t think it holds water, Kant’s claim—not only me, of course, many criticized him. Among other things, for example, they asked him—or asked about him—why do you assume there is a world outside at all? If all that is accessible to you is only the phenomena, only things as they appear in your cognition, then who says Berkeley isn’t right that all there is is only the cognitions within you, and there is no world outside that generates these cognitions? Where does that conclusion itself come from? Because how do you know there is a noumenon? All you encounter is the phenomenon. How do you know there is a noumenon? Beyond that there are all sorts of other difficulties. I think the fact that we formulate things in our language and use our tools of thought does not mean that one can use the intellect to know the world, or that the intellect basically gives me what is going on in the world. Suppose I reached some conclusion, say Newton’s second law: I reached the conclusion that the acceleration a body develops is proportional to the force acting upon it. Fine? Now Kant will say, how do you know? After all, that’s a generalization, it’s a product of the intellect. Who told you that’s what happens in the world? Maybe in the cases you observed it happened that way, but who told you it happened that way in all the other cases? So he says: because the structure of my intellect dictates this law of nature to me. This law of nature deals with the world as it appears to my eyes, not the world as it is in itself. Yes, that is the explanation Kant offered here. But then it turns out, say, that in the world itself there was a body whose acceleration was proportional to the square of the force, not to the force itself but to the square of the force. Okay? So what does Kant want to claim? That I wouldn’t be able to see that with my own eyes—the body, the body’s motion? That sounds absurd. Why not? The fact that the patterns of my brain arrive at the conclusion that force is proportional to acceleration—does that prevent my eyes from seeing the body moving with a different acceleration? Why wouldn’t they see it? He sees a moving body. Why should the eyes miss that? What’s the problem? How does the filtering of the phenomena I observe happen? How does that filtering correspond exactly to the patterns according to which my intellect works? Observation and intellect are two different faculties. Even though both are my faculties, still they are different faculties. There is no reason to think that I wouldn’t—suppose something happened without a cause. Then mentally I’m unwilling to accept that something happens without a cause, but would I be unable to see something that happened without a cause? Why not? And vice versa. Yes, the fact that I am forced to think in a certain way does not mean that it forces my eyes, and what they will or won’t see. Therefore, the Kantian thesis seems to me a very speculative thesis; it doesn’t hold water. In my opinion it is no more successful than the thesis it came to replace, or that it came to explain. Therefore I don’t think this thesis can really serve as an explanation. So what does? I think the only alternative that exists here—and again, I don’t know of anyone who formulated it in exactly this way, I formulate it this way, but I do think these insights already exist among various thinkers from various periods and kinds. And the claim basically is this: it is true, I want to separate, or blur, the dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. Our whole discussion until now assumed that I have to choose: either I am a rationalist or I am an empiricist, either I use the senses or I use the intellect. And the assumption was that these are two different independent faculties: either this works or that works. But I want to claim that the distinction between thinking and cognition is not so sharp. We have certain faculties—faculties in the sense of abilities, talents, capabilities, yes?—we have certain faculties that stand in the middle, or in between, between thinking and cognition. I think that’s what we call intuition. Our intuition brings up for us some kind of thoughts, insights, that are not logically derived from previous insights, but arise on their own. In other words, the principle of causality—I have an intuition that it is true, okay? So this is not something that comes out of observation, as Hume says. Hume says we do not learn the principle of causality from observation, so it came out of our fevered brain. Then people ask: okay, if it comes out of our fevered brain, then it probably only means that the patterns in our heads work causally. That is how we think. Does that mean the world works causally? Not necessarily. So why should I assume that the principle of causality is true in the world itself too? So my claim is that the principle of causality is not the result of thinking but the result of cognition. But no—Hume is right—it is not sensory cognition. It is cognition that is not through the senses, intellectual cognition. My claim is that our intellect has the ability to know things not through the five senses. What Maimonides called at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed “the eyes of the intellect.” This is an intellect that contemplates, not one that thinks; it contemplates the world. But it’s not my eyes—the intellect does this contemplation. So there is a cognitive act here, carried out by the intellect. Or what Rabbi HaNazir called “the logic of hearing,” yes? Husserl also has similar expressions, and others. French origin, by the way. The claim is that we basically have some kind of ability that one might call knowing thought.
[Speaker B] And that’s what’s called a sixth sense, no?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can call it a sixth sense too. It got various names from various people. But for our purposes it is something that combines the two things I previously called cognition and thought. There is a part of our thinking that is engaged in cognition of the world, not through the senses. The intellect knows the world. That is basically the claim. Now what should we call this ability, these faculties? Is it empiricist? Is it rationalist? What is it? It is not sensory cognition. On the other hand, it is not thought. It is a kind of contemplation of the world. When I use intuition, it is not like doing a mathematical calculation, two plus three equals five. That is pure thought. It has nothing to do with the world. It all takes place inwardly within me. But intuition, in my view at least, I think is a tool by means of which I grasp things in the world. It is a kind of interaction between me and the world, but not interaction through the senses, rather through other faculties I have. And in that sense it is actually a kind of observation—just not sensory observation. And I think the insights that we learn about the world not through the senses—the empiricists are right—these are insights that come from empiricism. Observations are also made by the intellect. And I claim that when we say that there is in the world a principle of causality, that everything must have a cause that generates it, how do we know that? Through observation. Hume is right. It is not sensory observation; the senses cannot see this. It is an observation performed by the intellect; our intuition grasps it. Intuition is not some brilliant intellectual flash; it is a cognitive flash, not an intellectual one. The intellect grasps something in the world. It grasps a structure, a law, a mode of behavior, a principle, some rationale in the world—not an object. An object you grasp with the senses, with hearing or sight, with touch or whatever. But when I want to grasp an idea, a concept, a thought, yes, some pattern, then I use the eyes of the intellect, not the senses. With inner logic, or however you want to call it.
[Speaker C] And that connects to the broader question of how mathematics, which is a result of the intellect alone, how the world knows to behave according to it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. I think mathematics is not a result of the intellect; it is a result of intuition. When I speak about mathematics I mean the assumptions of mathematics, the axioms, because the results are logical derivatives of the assumptions. And how do I know the axioms? How do I know that two parallel lines do not meet? That exactly one straight line passes between two points? I understand it logically. What does “understand” mean? But that’s a claim about the world. So I understand it with the eyes of the intellect. I contemplate the world, but I contemplate it with my eyes closed. And I understand that between two points there cannot be more than one straight line, and I understand that two parallels never meet. I understand it, and when I say “understand,” what I mean is: I see it. I see with the eyes of the intellect. I understand that this is correct, that this is the nature of the world. Okay, that is the point I want to make. Therefore, in my opinion this is the only explanation that really explains our ability to know things not through the senses. And here I’ll summarize, because this basically concludes the introduction to this series. We wrestled with the question of how we can know the world. Can we use the intellect to know the world? The empiricists are apparently right that we cannot. On the other hand, if really not, then there is no science. All there is is a collection of facts I saw. General laws, theses about electrons, about abstract things—that is not science in the narrow, pure empiricist sense. But I do find myself believing in those scientific laws, those scientific insights. So how can that be? The only way to explain it is that on the way to those insights and laws I used not only empirical sensory observations, but also principles that I understood through my intuition. I too drew them from the world, but I understood through my intuition that they are true, not through my eyes. And therefore the principle of causality, the principle of induction, all the things about which Hume raised a question mark and Kant did not solve—he formulated the question mark but did not really offer a solution, did not really offer a justification—it seems to me that the only possible justification is that these principles are actually the result of intellectual observation. You cannot know the world out of pure thought that takes place within me. But it is not true that one needs senses, or only senses. Rather, the principles of thought that I discern when I contemplate the world, and the Platonic world, the world of ideas, the real world, with the eyes of my intellect, with my intuition—those are what help me arrive at scientific laws, scientific insights, and they are in fact the justification for the rationalist components in scientific activity, for the components that are not pure observation, that are not pure facts. And at that point I will begin, and I’ll elaborate more next time.
[Speaker C] Science too recognizes the fact that it knows the world conditionally, what Popper said—until a refutation comes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll get to Popper, and all that is true. But still, he claims that he knows the world. Not with certainty—that is of course another question, whether I’m certain or not—but still, I think that this is the nature of the world, as long as it hasn’t been proved otherwise. And the philosophical question I’ve been dealing with until now is: what justifies your thinking that? Why assume that this is the nature of the world? Maybe it’s the nature of your patterns of thought.
[Speaker C] In a very interesting coincidence, today I bought the book, a new book by Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, Is the World Really Real? A Scientific-Philosophical Journey from Kant to Quantum.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I wrote a column about that on my site, about the book. After you read the book, I invite you to read that column.
[Speaker C] Okay. Which number is it? Where is it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One of the later ones, four hundred and something, maybe a little over five hundred, I think. Search—there’s a Google search on the site. Search the title of the book and I assume you’ll get to that column. Okay, I’ll stop here for now. Next time is Thursday, right? Just today, one time only, because of a scheduling constraint on my end we did it on Wednesday.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, just one small question, if I may? When the Rabbi describes intuition as some kind of sense for discovering truth about the world, the Rabbi is sort of ignoring the great influence of desire on that intuition. After all, suppose, let’s take Nachmanides for example—if we wanted to realize Nachmanides’ approach that everything is a miracle and live a life of miracle, and not accept causality as something real, and live in the consciousness of “I have set the Lord always before me,” everything is a miracle, then you really live that way and you see reality that way; maybe that’s really how Nachmanides lived. We, again, our desire—how we want to see the world—that’s how we describe it and that’s how we sense it and live it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll show you what I answered you on the previous question. There is a difference. If you claim that there really is no truth in this context—meaning, either there are laws in the world or the world is entirely miracles—I disagree. If you claim that my vision can be distorted, or my foundational assumptions can distort my vision, and therefore if I assume that the whole world is miracles then that’s how I’ll see it, and if I assume it isn’t miracles then I’ll see it in a more scientific way—there, you’re right. But that is a criticism of human beings.
[Speaker B] But practically speaking, if there is truth or there isn’t truth and we have no access to it at all, then what difference does it make to speak about truth that is inaccessible?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We definitely do have access. Not certainty, but access. We can think carefully about whether our foundational assumptions are justified or not justified, and where they influence our vision, and look critically at our conclusions and correct them. And if you look critically at your conclusions, then you will see that there are laws of nature in the world. Anyone who says otherwise is simply mistaken.
[Speaker C] To that, what they call “the world follows its natural course,” and that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Good, so Sabbath peace in advance. See you. Thank you.