Types of Interpretation, Lecture 6
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Table of Contents
- The Kabbalistic framework: sefirot, triads, and dialectics
- Creation–Formation–Action and matter–form
- Wisdom–Understanding–Knowledge as an intellectual parallel to the worlds
- Science as engagement with properties, classification, and distinction
- Worlds of ideas, concept and term, and the debate over abstract entities
- Definition and rationale, the yeshiva-world illusion of “what,” and examples from Jewish law
- An outside view and an inside view: anthropology as an analogy
- Why science advances: definition and not rationale, and the example of Aristotle and Newton
- Anaximander, conservation laws, and the law of conservation of being
- Maimonides, Nachmanides, eternity, and prime matter
- Analytical versus unifying thought: science, academia, and traditional learning
Summary
General overview
The text presents another angle on the relationship between an academic-scientific approach and a traditional Torah-based approach through a Kabbalistic model of Wisdom–Understanding–Knowledge as a dialectical structure of right–left–center, and parallels it to the structure of the worlds Creation–Formation–Action. The claim is that science deals mainly with forms, properties, classifications, and measurable distinctions, whereas the traditional perspective seeks to grasp the thing itself and the question of being, and tends toward synthesis and harmonization of contradictions. The examples from Anaximander, Newton, anthropology, and a reading of Nachmanides show how these differences of focus explain both the progress of science and the tendency of traditional learning toward reconciliation and constructing a unifying picture.
The Kabbalistic framework: sefirot, triads, and dialectics
The sefirot are arranged in triads, and Wisdom–Understanding–Knowledge present a dialectical relationship in which Knowledge is a synthesis between Wisdom and Understanding in a structure of right–left–center as thesis–antithesis–synthesis in the Hegelian sense. Wisdom–Understanding–Knowledge belong to the “mental faculties” and the world of thought, Kindness–Strength–Splendor belong to the world of character traits, and Eternity–Majesty–Foundation belong to the practical world as the “legs,” while Kingship gathers everything together. The ten sefirot are described either as Crown–Wisdom–Understanding or as Wisdom–Understanding–Knowledge, and the basic model determines whether Knowledge appears in the count.
Creation–Formation–Action and matter–form
Creation is described as something from nothing and as engagement with being itself; Formation as something from something and as giving form; and Action as the world in which a thing with form exists in a complete and integrated way. Greek philosophical abstraction is described as a language of matter and form, in which the objects in our world are composed of the thing itself and its forms, and the ideas are abstract properties like “horseness” or “redness” before they are clothed in a particular instance. Aristotle is presented as seeing matter–form primarily as an analytical abstraction and not necessarily as a historical description of actual emergence, and the distinction between existence and property is presented through the claim that existence is not a property and therefore the ontological proof fails on that point.
Wisdom–Understanding–Knowledge as an intellectual parallel to the worlds
Wisdom is defined as engagement with the “what” of the thing itself and with “essence,” and is linked to the expression koach mah, “the power of what.” Understanding is defined as distinction, analysis, and understanding one thing from another, and as engagement with forms and properties. Knowledge is defined as engagement with reality as it is, where matter and form are intertwined and hard to separate. The claim is that in order to operate at the level of Knowledge, one must activate Wisdom and Understanding through abstractions and abstract worlds, similarly to scientific analysis that uses models like “motion without friction” in order to understand the concrete world. The left side is identified with laws and separations as work according to rules, and the right side is identified with kindnesses and syntheses in the sense of seeking what lies behind oppositions.
Science as engagement with properties, classification, and distinction
Science is presented as engagement with form and not with the thing in itself, and as an activity whose center of gravity is classification, taxonomy, and distinguishing between things on the basis of quantifiable properties. Scientific distinctions are presented as work with ideas in the sense of abstract properties, because every difference and similarity is formulated through properties and not through being. The natural sciences are described as progressive because they limit themselves to measurable and testable matters, and modern science progresses when it gives up “why” in the sense of reason and purpose and remains with a “why” of the type of definition and generality that describes patterns.
Worlds of ideas, concept and term, and the debate over abstract entities
The text presents a distinction between a term as a linguistic structure and a concept as the content to which the term points, and raises the question whether ideas are entities or only abstractions. The example of the number three is presented as a separate idea according to a Platonic view, with reference to criticism of Frege’s definition and the Plato–Aristotle dispute over the existence of separate forms. The debate over “Who is a Jew?” is presented as proof that there is an idea toward which both sides are aiming, because if they were talking about different things there would be no debate, only an exchange of words, and the claim regarding definitions as “directive rather than constitutive” is presented as the view that the definition is trying to hit upon something that exists prior to its formulation.
Definition and rationale, the yeshiva-world illusion of “what,” and examples from Jewish law
The text argues that there is no real engagement with the “what” without a hidden assumption of “why,” because that same “what” can be organized in many ways depending on the understanding behind it. The yeshiva distinction between definition and rationale is presented as a division between defining the obligation and giving a purposive reason, and the example of the sukkah is presented such that “you shall dwell as you normally dwell” is an idea-definition from which “one who is distressed is exempt from the sukkah” is derived without relying on the reason for the verse. Rabbi Shimon is presented as someone who seeks the rationale as well and not only the definition, and the relation between definition and rationale is presented as blurry and complex despite the principled distinction.
An outside view and an inside view: anthropology as an analogy
The anthropological debate is described as a difference between living within a community in order to understand it from within, and documenting it from outside in order to define, quantify, and compare societies. The scientific approach is described as tending toward estrangement in the sense of looking from the outside in order to set boundaries, identify similarities and differences, and construct a taxonomy, whereas the internal perspective makes measurement and definition difficult. This distinction is presented as an illustration of the fact that science focuses on form and appearance and not on the thing as it is experienced from within.
Why science advances: definition and not rationale, and the example of Aristotle and Newton
Aristotle is presented as having become scientifically stuck where he asked “why” in a purposive or speculative sense that is not experimentally testable, such as “a stone falls to its natural place.” Newton is presented as asking a different kind of “why,” one of definition and unifying law of phenomena, without attributing purposes, and as someone able to unify different phenomena under a law by means of physical intuition that guides the classification. The text argues that rationale in the deeper sense still operates implicitly even in science, because the choice of how to organize phenomena is not arbitrary, as though one could unify any three objects into a group, but relies on a sense of direction that cannot always be justified in a testable way.
Anaximander, conservation laws, and the law of conservation of being
The passage from Anaximander is described as a cosmogonic theory in which the world is created through opposites that pay one another “penalties for their injustice,” and the text interprets this as an intuitive precursor to the modern idea of balancing and conservation. It is argued that a physical explanation of creation from opposites may satisfy the conservation laws of properties, but it does not solve the philosophical problem of the very appearance of being, and therefore a “law of conservation of being” is presented as a question to which physics is blind. The difference between one who thinks scientifically about creation and one who thinks philosophically is presented as the difference between being satisfied with an explanation of properties and demanding an explanation of existence itself.
Maimonides, Nachmanides, eternity, and prime matter
The text presents Maimonides’ opposition to an eternal world in its Aristotelian sense and distinguishes it from the Platonic conception of eternal prime matter to which form is given. A midrash from Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, “From what were the heavens created? From the snow beneath His glorious throne,” is cited as a text that Maimonides calls puzzling, and Nachmanides is cited in his commentary on Song of Songs as presenting creation in terms of something from something and hewing from prime matter, alongside his language in Genesis about something from nothing. The text proposes a traditional reconciliation according to which prime matter itself was first created by the Holy One, blessed be He, and only afterward did the physical separation of properties take place, and presents this as a demonstration of a unifying approach that is not testable in the scientific sense.
Analytical versus unifying thought: science, academia, and traditional learning
Science and academic Talmud study are described as dealing with contradictions by assigning them to different schools, periods, or authors, out of a commitment to testability, definitions, and metrics. Traditional learning is described as striving to resolve difficulties and build a synthesis showing that both sides are expressions of the same underlying matter, even when this cannot be put to an objective test. The text argues that this is not an accusation but a structural advantage of a lean science that advances through focus on measurable things, while at the same time presenting traditional synthesis as a legitimate engagement with a dimension that is not captured by scientific tools.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, basically what I want to do today is look at yet another angle on the relationship between, say, an academic approach and a traditional approach. Maybe with that I’ll finish this part, and then I’ll really move on to questions of plain meaning and interpretation, definition and rationale, or various ways of approaching texts in our context, meaning in the Torah context. Once I wrote an article on Torah and science, and I argued there basically two claims that somehow come together into one broader claim. I’ll formulate it in terms of the Kabbalistic sefirot. Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge; say, Kindness, Strength, Splendor, Eternity—meaning, there are these triads. The sefirot are built in groups of three. The upper triad is Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge. The relationship between Wisdom and Understanding and Knowledge is a dialectical one. Meaning, there is Wisdom, then there is Understanding, and Knowledge is some kind of synthesis between those two things. It’s always a move from right, left, and center. The center is some kind of combination of the right and the left: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A dialectical process in the Hegelian sense. It seems to me that this is basically what represents the relationship between the sefirot.
Now what happens in Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge? These are sefirot that deal with what is called the mental faculties, what’s in the head. They deal with thought. There is an aspect of Wisdom, an aspect of Understanding, and an aspect of Knowledge, all in the world of thought. Say, Kindness, Strength, and Splendor deal with character traits. It’s the same logical relation between the three elements, but not here—there, meaning in the world of traits. And after that Eternity, Majesty, and Foundation are already in the more practical world. That’s the legs. The legs are what walk. Eternity and Majesty are the right leg and the left leg, and Foundation is, yes, the reproductive organs. That’s in the middle. That’s the lower part. Again, the same triad. So this is basically thought, traits, and action. Those are the three triads: Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge; Kindness, Strength, Splendor; Eternity, Majesty, Foundation. And Kingship gathers everything together.
[Speaker B] There’s also Crown.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Above that, yes, but then there’s no Knowledge. Meaning, the ten sefirot are either Crown, Wisdom, Understanding or Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge. You have to choose how you describe it, in a certain sense what basis you choose. So what is the relationship between Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge? It’s like another such triad, not from the world of sefirot but from the world of worlds: Creation, Formation, and Action. Those are the three lower worlds in the Kabbalistic description. Creation is the coming into being of the thing, something from nothing. Creation—the very concept of creation means to create something from nothing. Formation is something from something. Why? Because formation is to create a form. Meaning, in creation you first create the thing itself so that it exists, and then you shape it. And after you shape it, Action is—that is, our world. What exists in our world is a thing with a form. That is already the synthesis or combination of the two together.
But this abstraction is also an abstraction in Greek philosophy—the same thing with form, Plato’s world of ideas, and it doesn’t matter; there are various descriptions, all of which basically say that the objects we know in our world are composed of matter and form. Meaning, first of all there is the thing itself; then there is the form I give it, its characteristics, its properties, and the combinations. Say, the characteristics and properties, when they are not yet clothed in the thing, are ideas—abstract ideas. Say, horseness, or redness, being red. Okay? So I’m not yet talking about some particular thing that is red; I’m talking about redness itself. Redness itself is an idea. That’s why the world of ideas is the world of forms. These are abstract forms. When they are clothed onto the thing, onto the raw material, onto the thing as such, what you get is basically the objects we know in our world.
All of this is abstraction. It doesn’t mean that there really was once something devoid of form, and also separate forms, and then they joined and that’s how our world was created. There are those who would see this also as a description—I’m not sure what to call it—a historical one, meaning that this is really how it happened, that was the process. But Aristotle, for example, doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as some kind of abstraction. It need not be that that is what actually happened, but one must know that within everything there is its matter and its form, and one can try to discuss each separately. I don’t really care at the moment whether this is a historical description of how things came to be or merely an abstraction that we perform on the things as we know them.
What is the difference between the thing and its characteristics? Almost everything I say—everything I can say about a thing—basically speaks about its form, its characteristics, its properties. I say that it is tall, short, kind-hearted, brown. Those all deal with the thing’s form, not the thing as such. For example, the statement that it exists. The statement that something exists is not a statement about any property of it. Existence is not a property. In the ontological proof—we once talked about this, I think, surely in the proofs for God’s existence, where I spoke about it; I also spoke about it in another philosophical context—the ontological proof actually fails on this point, in that it assumes that existence is a property. One of God’s perfections is that He exists. That is basically what the ontological proof assumes. And the counterclaim, with which I agree, says that this is incorrect. That’s not a kind of perfection. The perfection of something is one of its properties—it has a perfect property, the greatest power or the greatest beauty or whatever it may be, you can say that that’s a kind of perfection. But that the thing exists—that is not a statement about its properties, about its characteristics. It is a statement about the thing itself.
So, for example, the existence of a thing is a statement that deals with the thing as such, and everything else I say about it—again, as I said before—tall, short, made of wood, not made of wood, made this way, made that way, looks this way, looks that way, and so on—all of that deals with properties. So basically, even our statements about things: some statements speak about the things themselves, and some statements speak about the properties of things.
Now in practice, to a great extent, science deals with properties. Science deals with the form of the thing, not the thing as such. And how do we grasp it, how do we classify it? That’s why there are many sciences that are basically taxonomic; they are classificatory sciences. Meaning, they basically classify, like in zoology. Zoology, at least the basic kind, before you get into the properties of animals and then get more into what really generates the various properties—but first of all there is taxonomy, there is classification of plants or animals. There are families, and those families are divided into species and types and this and that, and we make some kind of classification. That is essentially scientific work. Scientific work classifies things. Even in physics we classify phenomena into different kinds, even if not objects perhaps—though really objects too, according to properties. There are particles of this kind; all elementary particles are divided into families. Families according to properties. That too is a kind of classification, okay? Even though it’s not a classification of things we see with our eyes, like with animals or plants, still, it is a classification that involves theoretical work and abstractions. But it’s still classification.
Meaning, science to a great extent classifies. It makes distinctions: this goes here and that goes there. It deals with distinguishing between things, with similarity between things and distinction between things. When one makes a distinction, or deals with distinction or similarity between things, one is dealing with the form of things. When I say that this is different from that, I always mean it is different from that because this one is brown and that one is yellow. Meaning, there is some property that exists in this one and not in that one. Or this is a bird and that is a fish. Therefore they are different; they belong to different families, they have different properties. Now birdness and fishness are ideas. Or redness and yellowness are ideas. Meaning, the distinction is always made in terms of properties. Distinction deals with forms. When I distinguish one thing from another, that is always to point to its form. It has a different form—form, again, in a much broader sense, of course, not necessarily geometric form but any sort of properties, yes? How it appears, how it is perceived. It is perceived differently.
And therefore science very often deals in distinctions and less in syntheses; rather it deals more with distinctions, mainly distinctions between things that appear similar to us. It is the scientist’s job to try nonetheless to identify distinctions, even though to the layman’s eye they look similar. So it deals in distinctions—that’s the first point—and second, it deals in forms. Two points that are connected to one another. It deals with form and not the thing itself. So if I go back to Creation, Formation, and Action: if there is no knowledge, from where comes distinction?
[Speaker B] What? If there is no knowledge, from where comes distinction?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but that’s if there is no—
[Speaker B] “If there is no knowledge, from where comes distinction” is connected to knowledge.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That I don’t know, I need to think about it, but Wisdom is above Understanding.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, apparently it should be Understanding, but it seems that when people say “if there is no knowledge, from where comes distinction,” they mean that Wisdom also takes part in distinctions. I’ll get to that in a moment. Understanding is making distinctions, that’s clear. But Wisdom is there in the background too. Fine, that’s the issue—I’ll get to it in a moment.
So let me go back for a moment to the worlds of Creation, Formation, and Action. If I describe it this way, Creation basically describes how the thing itself comes into being. Creation is something from nothing: how being comes into existence, the very fact that it is, that the thing exists. And therefore this is essence itself—not form, not form but matter. Matter in the abstract philosophical sense, not matter in the sense of wood, but matter in the sense of the thing itself stripped of forms, prime matter. When I am not yet referring to properties, there is the ball as such and there is the collection of the ball’s properties. Okay? So the ball is the bearer of the properties; it is the thing about which I say that it exists. After that I can begin to speak about its properties.
So the world of Creation is basically a world in which there are things that are devoid of properties. Again, not necessarily that there is such a world and they exist there, but I’m saying that this abstraction called the world of Creation is engagement with things as such, with primordial things. Then comes the world of Formation. The world of Formation is a world in which there are forms. That’s why angels, for example, are in the world of Formation, because angels are separate forms. These are floating forms; they are not entities in the ordinary sense, although in the Platonic view one says that forms are entities. There is a dispute here. It even seems to me that in several places one can infer that Maimonides, for example, held that there really is no such thing as angels. And that is basically to look at things Aristotelianly rather than Platonically, which is basically to say that ideas don’t really exist but are our abstractions. Forms are not—there is no world in which there are separate forms, abstract forms; forms are our abstractions. Form is the form of something. There is no such thing as redness; there is this red thing or that red thing.
I may once have spoken about Frege’s definition of number; right now I’m actually reading his book. Frege’s definition of number—he says, what is the definition? I never understood this thing. The definition of the number three is the set of all sets that contain three elements. I never understood that. Why is that a definition of the number three? It seems to me a very strange approach, I don’t know, but that’s how he built his logic. I think you need to understand the number three before you know which set has three elements, because otherwise how do you know what those sets are? We talked about definition through extension and through intension; I think it’s a bit connected to these matters.
In any case, what I’m saying is that the number three is a separate form. I’m not talking about a trio of particular objects. When I say this set has three elements, then that form is already clothing a particular set. But the number three as such is an idea. The question whether it exists or not is the dispute between Plato and Aristotle.
[Speaker C] What does it mean, worlds that contain ideas? What does such a world look like aside from abstraction? What—is there such a place?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s an abstract world, but still—abstract things can exist. In what sense do they exist? Where does this light that you see here exist? Where does it exist? In what sense does it exist? It’s an abstract thing, but we usually understand it as something that exists. We have physical definitions for an electromagnetic wave.
[Speaker C] Fine, so that’s light. Is this a world that contains an idea, that contains a word—red?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not a word—a concept. A term.
[Speaker C] A world in what sense?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s a difference between a concept and a term. A term is a linguistic creature; a concept is the content that the linguistic creature points to. So I’m saying that in this world sits, for example, the idea of democracy. I agree, I accept this—
[Speaker C] I just can’t manage to separate it from abstraction. Meaning, these are entities that are abstract. Nobody disputes that they are abstract; the question is whether they are entities.
[Speaker C] Yes, but if—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The scale isn’t wide enough; I don’t know how to pour more content into it. The question is whether this is something that exists.
[Speaker C] I accept it—as abstraction in the mind it seems fine to me, okay, there’s a world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And I think we once talked about debates, say about who is a Jew. We talked about Rabbi Shach’s famous speech, and Chaim Herzog the president, and the responses to him. There’s a debate over who is a Jew. One says: someone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to Jewish law. If you begin the process, that’s a kind of recursive definition all the way back to Sarah our matriarch. From there: someone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to Jewish law. That is basically a kind of mathematical definition of the concept Jew. And someone else says that whoever feels himself to be Jewish, is a loyal citizen of the state, speaks Hebrew, reads Amos Oz—various characteristics of that sort—that is what is called a Jew.
And then I asked—I think I even spoke about this this year—what is the argument about? Is there really an argument here, or are they simply talking about different things? One person calls this thing “Jew,” another person calls that thing “Jew,” so let’s part ways on semantic grounds. You call this “Jew,” you call it “kettle.” Why use the same word with different meanings? My claim was that there is a real argument here. Both sides feel that there is a real argument here—they’re fighting, after all. Why? Because they understand that there is such a thing as a Jew. They have an argument about how to describe it. But there is such a thing as a Jew—the idea of a Jew. Now, when someone wants to translate that idea, okay, what does it mean? Suddenly you get different translations, different translations. Sometimes the connection between them is rather weak; sometimes they are far apart, sometimes not. But still, the very existence of an argument points to the fact—
[Speaker C] —that there is something both of them are aiming at.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Otherwise what’s the argument? Just use two different words and that’s that. What are you arguing about—a right to use a word?
[Speaker C] No, but then there are practical consequences. If he calls it “Israeli” and you call it “Jew,” then—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m saying those practical consequences testify that there is something there. The argument is not only about the practical consequences. If the argument is only about practical consequences, then change the law. Say that the rights of immigration belong not to a Jew but to an Israeli or a kettle. What difference does it make? You defined it one way, define it differently.
[Speaker C] But then you lose the rights and you lose the rights that are created, so to speak.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So why do you care about created rights?
[Speaker C] No, but then what difference does it make?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly what I’m saying.
[Speaker C] By what right are you here? And things like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but that you won’t solve by definitions. That’s exactly the point. These things reflect a real statement about reality. I’m here because I continue my ancestors, those who were once called Jews, and therefore I am here. That is a real claim; it is no longer a claim of definition.
[Speaker C] I agree, but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The other side doesn’t define it that way. Huh? So then we have an argument. No problem—we have an argument. But still, what I’m claiming is not a definition but a claim. We talked about definitions—ah, now I remember where we were—
[Speaker C] In the series on definitions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s where I talked about this. Meaning, definitions are usually directive and not constitutive. Meaning, there is something that exists before the definition, unlike the way mathematicians understand a definition, as constituting the thing. No—we are trying to hit upon the thing. The definition tries to grasp what the thing is like. And sometimes we define differently, but then we will have an argument if we define differently, because we are trying to define something that is really there. And that is basically the statement that there is such an idea called democracy. Now we may argue whether in a democracy it is proper for a judge to engage in judicial legislation or not, whether the legislator should legislate and the judge should judge. There’s a debate whether that is fitting for democracy or not fitting for democracy. But that debate is not about different concepts. We have an argument, and argument means that we are talking about the same concept when we speak about democracy, but we argue about how it should properly appear or how it should properly function. That’s the meaning of an argument. If we are talking about two different things, that is not an argument.
[Speaker C] So necessarily there has to exist such a world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, that’s what I’m saying.
[Speaker C] There has to be a world of ideas.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. According to Aristotle, in fact, arguments become drained of content. I spoke then about definitions—according to Aristotle, arguments are really just a question of which conceptual world is more convenient to use. You can perhaps argue about what is more convenient to use, which conceptual system. But it doesn’t really matter. We spoke about the bird’s cry in space, Borges, with some cloud like cumulonimbus, I don’t know what, and Beethoven’s Eighth. For me, those three are x-y-z. That’s the concept, and those are the items included in it. Why not? What’s the problem? Why can’t I connect any three objects into one group and give it a name? Or any set of properties? Why is it that for the set of properties that constitutes a democratic state, I see that set as something worth assigning a concept or a term in the language to? Why not just any random set of properties? Because I understand that in this set of properties there is some connection between them—they do together build some kind of idea that is worth devoting a term to. And it is not just some arbitrary set of properties that I decided on.
[Speaker C] Isn’t it like words in a language? I mean, I don’t know, now “internet”—so it’s “internet,” we gave it the name “internet.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but there is an internet, because without it you wouldn’t build it. No, okay, they built it—but after they built it, it exists. If there were no internet, there would be no word. You could call the term “internet” not internet but “lectern,” okay, whatever, that part is arbitrary. But you don’t produce a concept with a term if there is no concept that it describes. A concept is not a linguistic creature.
[Speaker C] So before they invented the internet, was there in the world of ideas an internet?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes—that is the Platonic claim. This concept is basically an existing concept; we discovered it, we didn’t create it. Okay? We created the object, the internet. But we created it because someone uncovered the idea of the internet, and he decided to realize it. That’s why people often say “to realize an idea.” Because realizing the idea is no less important than discovering it. Discovery is already the beginning of realization, because it’s there. In the Platonic conception, it is basically there; you didn’t create it, you discovered it. You uncovered it. Fine, that’s already a worldview dispute, of course.
So the claim is basically that Creation is the creation of the thing itself, still. The world of Action is our world—that is, the world as we know it, in which there is no matter without form and no form without matter; things already come combined together. Now the intellectual tools for dealing with these three aspects are Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge. In such a way that Wisdom is what is called—maybe the Arizal writes this, I don’t remember who the source is—koach mah, “the power of what.” To deal with the what, with the thing itself, before you even start speaking about it, first of all with the object, with the essence—that is Wisdom. Understanding is to understand one thing from another, to distinguish between things. Meaning, that is form. That is engagement with properties, with forms; basically scientific engagement—that is Understanding. And Knowledge is engagement with the objects as they are.
And as we discussed once, one of the previous years, I spoke about forced interpretations. There I said that a forced interpretation is basically creating some kind of Platonic world, but it is a way of dealing with our world. When we want to deal with a phenomenon in our world, we look at the phenomenon and it is terribly complex; usually we can’t deal with it. So what we do is make various abstractions of it. We say that this phenomenon involves such-and-such concepts. Each such concept, I know how it behaves; there are some laws that determine how it behaves. Each such thing is of course in some abstract world where that concept appears not clothed in an object, but as a concept. That is the world of motion without friction. It is not our world; in our world there is no motion without friction. But in some abstract world there is motion without friction, and there Newton’s first law is true—that a body continues in uniform motion in a straight line; it does not slow down and does not change direction. In our world that obviously does not happen, but it is important to know Newton’s first law in order to analyze our world, together with the world of the second law so we’ll understand it, and together with thermodynamics and quantum theory and all those laws, together with physics. And this is true in every scientific context.
To understand our world I have to create Platonic worlds, abstract Platonic worlds, and that is the concept of a forced interpretation. I spoke about that there. So basically Knowledge is to deal with our world. To deal with our world, with the composite object already containing matter and form and so on—that is hard. In order to deal with Knowledge, you need Wisdom and Understanding. You need to make abstractions, to turn this into worlds of abstract forms like these. After you clothe Wisdom and Understanding together, you will be able to deal with Knowledge. That is the intellectual way of following this physical process of Creation, Formation, and Action. Intellectually, it is Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge. It’s the same thing, the same structure. Wisdom deals with being itself, what was created in the world of Creation. Understanding deals with forms—Formation, from the language of form—that is the form. And Knowledge deals with reality itself, the complex reality in which matter and form are already together and hard to separate. And therefore one has to make abstractions. When I deal with Knowledge, I abstract, activate Wisdom and Understanding, and then I return to Knowledge and understand how the concrete, real world behaves.
So Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge are basically the intellectual parallel to Creation, Formation, and Action. On the level of thought, on the intellectual plane, it is Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge. In Kabbalistic language, Understanding is, say—Wisdom is on the right side, Understanding on the left side, and Knowledge in the middle. The left side is what is called judgments, the right side is called kindnesses or something like that. And in the Kabbalistic meaning of the matter, kindness and judgment in some broader abstract sense—not kindness and judgment as we usually understand them, as just specific cases. Because what is judgment? Judgment is working according to rules. This is what the law says: do this, don’t do that, you must do this and may do that. Judgment deals with separations. Therefore judgment parallels, say, scientific engagement. Even in the world of Jewish law there is the world of laws. The halakhic decisor says this is correct, this is incorrect, this is permitted, this is forbidden. He is a man of law; in a certain sense he is a man of science, or maybe even less than a man of science—it is just taxonomy, the lower part of science. The analytic Torah scholar basically deals with things in abstraction, with more abstract things, and he basically deals with Wisdom. Many times the scholar clings to the canes of Understanding, but behind the matter—and here I return to “if there is no knowledge, from where comes distinction?”—behind the matter there sits an understanding, yes, the abstraction.
The Brisker illusion, to which I’ll return later, says that we deal only with the what and not with the why. The entire yeshiva world is educated on that. We deal with the what and not with the why. We say what is written; we cannot understand why it is written—that’s the reason for the verse, and so on. But there is no such thing as dealing with the what without asking yourself the why. If you don’t understand the why, then the what can be described in a hundred thousand ways. We talked about—maybe I spoke about this too, I don’t remember—the ox that gores, for which one must pay. There are four primary categories of damages. One of them is horn. And why—what is horn? I would simply say: any damage caused by horns is horn. Right? That’s one possibility. I’m asking only what, not why. What did the Torah say? That if someone damages with horns, he has to pay. Someone else will say, not at all. The Torah said that anyone who causes damage intentionally—that is called horn damages. The horn is only an example. Someone who caused damage intentionally is the one who has to pay. Fine? He too is only answering the what, but he answers the what differently. Why does he answer the what differently? Because he understands the why differently.
Now many times you don’t say to yourself—you don’t consciously account for—what that why is on which you are relying, but behind your answer to the question “what” there sits an implicit answer to the “why.” Because without understanding at least a bit of the why, you won’t be able to answer the what.
[Speaker E] Is that the difference between Rabbi Chaim and Rabbi Shimon Shkop? Rabbi Shimon explicitly asks the why?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, I think so. Rabbi Chaim too has a why behind things, so he lives in illusions, but he denies it. I mean psychologically—he’s in denial. And Rabbi Shimon Shkop puts it on the table. By the way, this is not exactly—and not exactly—and not exactly the reason for the verse. It’s what in the yeshiva world is called definition and not rationale. Just now I saw that Rabbi Sheinwald wrote something about Rabbi Itiel Nadel, Rabbi Itiel Nadel’s method of learning. He says there that it’s the idea of the commandment. It’s not the reason for the commandment; it’s not the same thing. The idea—for example, in the commandment of sukkah, the basic idea is “you shall dwell as you normally dwell.” You have to live in the sukkah. That doesn’t tell me the reason—why one must sit in the sukkah. That’s a different question: “so that your generations shall know that I made the children of Israel dwell in sukkot”—in this case the Torah tells us why. But that is a different question. I’m talking about the question of what the Torah imposes upon me when it tells me the commandment to dwell in the sukkah. Obviously, it says to dwell in the sukkah. Okay, obvious. But when I want to define the idea, the idea is not why we do this, but what is imposed on me conceptually—in other words, what is the definition of the commandment, and that is an abstract definition. It’s not just sitting, eating, sleeping. Those are the simple things. But how do I extract the general idea from that? To live there as in a home. And the translation of that is: sit, sleep, eat—whatever you do in your home, do in the sukkah.
And that has many implications. For example, the sick are exempt from the sukkah. A person in distress is exempt from the sukkah. That is the result of this definition. Why? Not because the reason for the commandment means there is no point in doing this commandment if you are distressed. That would be a demand based on the reason for the verse. Rather, this is the definition. The definition of the commandment says that you have to live there like in your house. If you are distressed, you would not live in that house. You don’t live in a house where you are suffering. You go to another house. So if the definition is “you shall dwell as you normally dwell,” then a person in distress is exempt from the sukkah, and that is not a derivation from the reason for the verse; it is the definition.
[Speaker F] The answer to why, say in the case of sukkah—when you ask why, that’s the reason. Why? Because “I made the children of Israel dwell in sukkot.” Really it depends which kind of why.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s a “why” on the level of rationale, and there’s a “why” on the level of definition. Those are two different things. You can ask: why do we sit and eat in the sukkah? Because you have to dwell in the sukkah the way you dwell in a home. That’s only a definition. You understand that we still haven’t gone down to a deeper level of causes and reasons, justifications. We only tried to define—like in a scientific theory—we tried to define more broadly the meaning of all the halakhic details. But not why they are imposed on me. I haven’t dealt with that question at all. Okay?
[Speaker F] So now when you say that Rabbi Shimon expounds the rationale of the verse—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s something else—that’s the reason. That’s why I’m saying: definition is what we do all the time, we examine the definition. It has nothing to do with the dispute between Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yehuda over whether we expound the rationale of the verse or not. That’s exactly the point. Rabbi Shimon wants to claim that we also look for the reason, not just the definition. And that’s the discussion. Now, the boundary is of course not always sharp, and again I’m saying: there is also a connection between the reason and the definition. How do you know what the definition is if you don’t have some idea of what the reason is? We talked about childbed fever—what was his name? Doctor Semmelweis. Exactly, yes. Or about the pillow, or history. There I spoke precisely about these complex relations between definition and reason. That’s really the point. In any case, so law—say, on the left side in the kabbalistic world—that’s the side that deals with distinctions, and therefore it’s Binah. Aristotelian intellect already recognized this: logical intellect is separating intellect. You say: this yes, this no. Okay? Yes, analysis. But there is another perspective, which I call not Binah but Chokhmah, wisdom—that’s the right side, which deals with syntheses. But why does it deal with syntheses? Or how does it create the synthesis? It enters the question of why. When you create a synthesis between two things that seem opposite, that’s because you’re not satisfied with how they look. You ask yourself: what stands behind what I’m seeing? And behind what I’m seeing, suddenly you discover that in fact it’s not at all certain there’s a contradiction; it could be that they are really two facets of the same thing. If you ask yourself what the thing is, then you can suddenly discover that the two contradictory things are two facets of it. But if you say there is no thing at all, I deal only with the facets themselves—then the facets themselves contradict. This is the opposite of that. They’re two different things. The way to create syntheses is really to move from the form to the thing, from Binah to Chokhmah.
And therefore, if I summarize what I’ve just said—and then I’ll move to two examples—but let me summarize for a moment what I’ve just said. I basically want to look from another angle at the relationship between scientific engagement with things and traditional engagement with things. So here I want to make a double distinction in terms of the sefirot, or in the terms I described here. One aspect is that the traditional perspective wants to grasp the thing itself, while the scientific perspective deals with its appearance, its properties, the characteristics that can be quantified. Right? Basically you want to grasp the thing as you grasp it—you define it, you quantify it, you say where it is and where it isn’t. Definition, by the way, comes from the word fence. How far does it go, and from what point is it no longer there? Right? To put a fence around something is called defining it. We spoke about the concept of the Infinite, which can’t be defined because it has no end, no boundary. To define something, you need to understand how far it extends and from where it is no longer itself, but something else. That’s what it means to define—to place a boundary around the thing.
By the way, someone told me not long ago that “to know,” for example, is related to “to estrange oneself.” When you want to know something, you need to look at it from outside. You need to estrange yourself from it. You need to see how far it goes and where it is absent, like a definition. To estrange yourself from someone is, as it were, to step outside of him, to be a bit antagonistic toward him. There was a big dispute, by the way, among anthropologists. There was a big argument over how to conduct anthropological research. Margaret Mead, for example, in Coming of Age in Samoa—yes, a famous book. A student of—I've forgotten the name of that dinosaur—she almost founded modern anthropology, and she argued that you have to live in Samoa among the natives in order to understand how their minds work. And scientific anthropology tries rather to withdraw from that, and tries to define—to look from a high mountain down on the village in Samoa and write things down, describe from the outside. On the contrary, specifically to insist on not going inside, but documenting from the outside in order to focus on things that can be defined and quantified. If you’re inside, you can’t define and quantify; you live it, those are your life. So that isn’t scientific work. In scientific work, you need to see what is similar between Samoa and the Philippines, or, I don’t know, the forests of Bolivia. What is similar and what is different. And for that you need not to live any one of them, but to sit outside, describe the characteristics each one has, and see what is similar and what is different and what goes with what and what doesn’t go with what. That’s how you create a taxonomy. Okay?
So in the natural sense, a scientific approach is to look at things from outside. It is not to enter wisdom, to grasp the thing itself, but the opposite: to observe it from outside and see how it looks. That is to relate to the form. All right? So basically two characteristics distinguish the traditional perspective from the scientific perspective. One characteristic is that the scientific perspective deals with the form of things, the properties of things, while the traditional perspective tries to grasp the things themselves. And the second characteristic is that the scientific perspective separates, while the traditional perspective unifies; it is more harmonistic. Meaning, it is less inclined toward separations and more inclined to see that things do not contradict one another, but rather fit together. Yes, in the yeshivot, the basic thing people do is resolve difficulties. There are two things that seem contradictory, and you have to reconcile them. What does it mean to reconcile them? It means showing that there is no contradiction, but that they are different expressions of the same thing. Rabbi Chaim’s two laws, in this sense, are a very yeshivish act, even though they are very—
[Speaker C] Logical.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, very much Binah, precisely, because he is basically telling you that these are two facets of the same thing, so you can reconcile it, it’s not contradictory. Rabbi Chaim’s question is science. Science stops at the question. Science says: here it is like this and here it is like that, and therefore these are two different things, there is a contradiction. This belongs to this school of study, that belongs to that school of study. These are the sages of France, these are the sages of Spain. We spoke earlier about sanctification of God’s name—that’s something else. The traditional approach says: wait a second, let’s see what stands behind the things. These are just two ways of looking at the same thing. So I want to look at the thing itself on the one hand, and create syntheses. Those are the two characteristics.
So, say, in the language—in the kabbalistic language—I would say that there is a difference between Chokhmah and Binah. Chokhmah is dealing with the thing itself, and Binah is dealing with its properties, its forms. And there is a difference between the relation of Chokhmah and Binah and the relation of Da’at. The relation of Da’at is the synthesis, and Chokhmah and Binah are the analysis. Okay? Therefore these three sefirot actually conceal within themselves two axes of distinction. One axis is the thing itself versus the forms; the second axis is a separating attitude versus a unifying attitude, a harmonistic attitude. Okay? And these are two characteristics that distinguish a traditional approach from a scientific one. By the way, one of the reasons—and I’m saying this so it won’t be misunderstood—is that this is not a criticism of science. On the contrary, it is science’s praise: that it knows how to focus on those things in which one can advance in a precise and controlled way, and so on. That is where the ability to advance is rooted. If science loses those distinctions and tries to deal with wisdom, it won’t get anywhere. Because those are things you can’t quantify, you can’t turn them into equations, you won’t be able to advance. Everyone will just say whatever fantasies he has, and you can’t advance that way.
[Speaker D] It’s not measurable, but it does advance. Why not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think it—it’s very hard to advance in that area.
[Speaker D] It’s not, not really.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. The feeling is that it almost doesn’t advance.
[Speaker D] And how does science know how to advance without asking why? What? How does science know how to advance without asking why?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s the point: it does ask why, but it tries to refine only those aspects that can be answered in a quantitative and defined way. Behind the things—it’s like not expounding the rationale of the verse. How can you advance without expounding the rationale of the verse? We rule not like Rabbi Shimon. Because we do in fact relate to the rationale of the verse, only implicitly. We don’t put it on the table, we don’t deal with it. It is there implicitly. We try to define things insofar as they are graspable, can be grasped. Okay? Behind it—you can’t completely disconnect it. We wouldn’t have been able to define if we didn’t have some understanding of what lies behind it. But we don’t deal with that.
Why was Aristotle scientifically stuck? Aristotle was scientifically stuck in every field in which he asked why. When he asked why a stone falls to the earth—because it is drawn to its source—right? That’s where he got stuck. Because when you ask why, you start talking nonsense. How do you test whether the stone is drawn to its source or not? Can you put that to an experiment? That’s a nice homiletical line. Those aren’t scientific statements.
[Speaker E] But what about Newton? What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Newton, unlike Aristotle? Newton asked himself not why in that sense, but more definition and not reason—if at all. Taxonomy doesn’t even say that much; it only says what. All right? But science is not only taxonomy; taxonomy is the first stage. After that comes the second stage, where it asks why—but why in the sense of definition, not in the sense of reason. What do we see here? But what do we see here not in the sense of collecting all the phenomena we see, but trying to show what rule lies behind them. Not the reason, not why in that sense. Rather it’s a different kind of why. You can call it why, but it’s not why in the sense of the reason. What does the stone want to achieve? It’s not what is the stone’s purpose, but what do stones do? All right? Or what do massive objects do—not necessarily stones, stones are just one particular case. So I’m making a generalization, but I’m not entering into the thing itself. I’m still remaining in the world of forms; I’m just generalizing the forms. I’m doing what I earlier called definition and not reason. Okay.
Now, the moment modern science understood that it had to give up the “why,” it began to advance. Modern science advances thanks to this trait—that it does not ask why. Or it asks the more superficial why, the why of definition and not the why of reason. Yes, I’m saying: it asks the more superficial question of why, the why of definition, not the why of reason. The reason is also there in the background—I said you can’t disconnect it completely—but I don’t deal with the reason. For me, the reason lies in the non—like I once mentioned that distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification in scientific theory. The claim is that I’m not interested in how you discovered the theory. People once thought: let’s see where—how you know. Why do you care how I know? Check what I’m saying. If what I’m saying is justified, if it stands the test of experiment, then that’s fine. Why do you care why? Why is it like that? How do I know? That’s not the question we ask. We ask what are you saying. And that is really just like Rabbi Chaim. And that’s what enabled science to advance; and by the way, that’s what enabled Rabbi Chaim-style learning to advance. In that sense, Rabbi Chaim was groundbreaking.
Despite all the criticism of him—yes, I do criticize him, unlike science, because I think in the end you can’t disconnect from the why—but my criticism of him is of course anachronistic. He was right. If he hadn’t done—if I had been living in that period, we wouldn’t be where we are today. It’s thanks to Rabbi Chaim that we are where we are. Why? Because after Rabbi Chaim created the taxonomy, now we can begin to ask: wait a second, what stands behind this? And then try to understand what stands behind Rabbi Chaim’s mathematics. But he dealt only with the mathematics. All right? Or at least lived under the illusion that he dealt only with the mathematics. And here it really turns into terrible formalism, without understanding—you obviously have to understand things, feel things, in order to issue a halakhic ruling, in order to know what is a sound intuition and what is not. This is not mathematics. Okay? So that is of course an anachronistic criticism, not really justified—that’s the criticism of Rabbi Chaim. It’s really a criticism of those who want to work like Rabbi Chaim today. That’s not right. We’ve passed Rabbi Chaim’s stage, and it’s a good thing that he existed, because without him we wouldn’t have been able to reach modern Talmudic conceptual learning. Precisely because Rabbi Chaim was satisfied with little, he was able to advance, exactly like in modern science.
[Speaker F] Yes, but I think you’re mixing concepts here. Meaning, now I can ask—suppose that eating less than the minimum measure doesn’t obligate a person in the sukkah, let’s say. And I ask: why doesn’t eating below the minimum measure help, or count as the measure? And then you say: because that amount isn’t considered an act of eating. Now, I still haven’t answered the question of why. I’m still still at the level of what. Meaning, wait, wait, wait. And I’m saying that even the question of “you shall dwell as you ordinarily live” is still in the realm of what. Obviously.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And not why. Obviously—it’s definition and not reason. Right. Correct. It’s definition and not reason. I’m dividing here between three levels. Meaning: there is the taxonomy itself. There are the facts that I see. Just describing the facts. I see these and these kinds of animals.
[Speaker F] Meaning what Rabbi Chaim did—he says, from his standpoint, I dealt only with what.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right. Only with what. I claim that’s an illusion, though, because you can’t deal with what unless you have some connection to why.
[Speaker F] Even on the third plane, the why of reason.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, the why of reason. There is no definition without reason, because you can create the definition in many forms. You can organize the phenomena in many intellectual forms. Why do you choose דווקא this one? Because it sounds reasonable to me. What does “sounds reasonable to me” mean? It means that basically you feel that the reason leads here. But you haven’t put the reason on the table, you’re not dealing with the reason. You’re dealing with the definition. Clearly, behind this sits some connection to reason. Otherwise I could have organized the—where did you even get this invention of “you shall dwell as you ordinarily live”? Why don’t you interpret the verse differently? The verse says “you shall dwell seven days”—why not “you shall dwell as you ordinarily fly”? Why not “you shall dwell as you ordinarily fly”? Why “you shall dwell as you ordinarily live”? You do understand, after all, a bit of what the Torah wants to achieve when it tells you to sit in the sukkah. Right, you’re not making that the focus, you’re not dealing with the reason, but it’s there. There is no Binah without Chokhmah.
[Speaker C] Where is the why in science? What? Where is—I feel the connection here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here, for example, with Newton. Let’s go back to Newton. When he gathered this collection of phenomena—the falling of objects to the earth, the tides, and the paths of the planets—and all of that became what he called gravitation. And I ask: how did it occur to him that three phenomena so different from each other belong to the same scientific domain? That the same law is supposed to explain all three? What was the idea? Why didn’t he connect the tides with the pitch of crows screeching?
[Speaker C] Because he had to explain something similar to masses. So—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean similar to masses? Similar in what sense? Crows are black too, just as mass is black.
[Speaker C] No, because he saw that it depended on—that the tides, he felt there was some motion of masses here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning that he actually understood this phenomenon of masses attracting.
[Speaker C] Not only that he understood it, I think he understood it before—the tides he understood only afterward.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s why I’m saying: but he understood the reason implicitly. He didn’t put it on the table, but it was behind it, and that’s what guided him.
[Speaker C] Understood the reason—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The reason of this, or—
[Speaker C] The definition?
[Speaker B] With mathematicians—a physicist with physical intuition. Right, he feels things intuitively without mathematics.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The mathematicians who would encounter—say, an abstract mathematician, a person who is only a mathematician—he sees the collection of phenomena and can offer you a hundred thousand ways to organize them into groups, classify them—no problem, there are many ways to do it. A physicist activates intuition and says: this is the right way. This division is the right way. Why? Where does that come from? It comes from the reason. Now, true, we don’t deal with that, because it’s something hard to critique, something hard to work with, hard to advance with. And Aristotle, who tried to advance with it, got stuck. Because you can’t.
[Speaker C] Reason in the sense of the rationale of the verse—that the reason the apple falls downward is that it has an interest.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, not an interest. You understand how things go, you understand the—within the definition? Yes. It’s not definition, it’s more—when I say reason I don’t quite manage to arrange it. There is some aspect here of reason, but it’s not the question of what it wants to achieve—that is of course a vulgarization. But you feel the—say, in the sense of language.
[Speaker C] I feel that, I’m just trying to think where exactly the reason is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the sense of language, the difference between living inside that tribe and feeling how they think and how they work, versus documenting what they do. Like: in such a situation they do—do you understand? That’s the difference. In that sense, that’s what I mean. You live the physics, and you understand what drives it, and then you organize the phenomena in that way. Because the mathematician who doesn’t use that intuition will organize the phenomena for you in a hundred thousand ways, classify and arrange them—no problem, there are lots of ways.
I’ll perhaps bring two examples that illustrate this. One illustrates the first difference, and the second illustrates the second difference. First example: there is a passage—I think it’s the earliest passage from Greek philosophy that we have in writing—a passage from Anaximander. It too is somewhat damaged, a few words are missing, but there is more or less a reconstruction of a short section of his words. After that there are later texts that explain Anaximander’s doctrine, and from that people understood what this passage also means. When? Some Eleatic, meaning well before Aristotle. It’s around Zeno’s period, I don’t know exactly.
[Speaker B] Minus what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, you’d have to check. Look at the Eleatics, Zeno and people like that, that school. I don’t know, it’s a few centuries BCE.
[Speaker B] Six hundred BCE?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, maybe around there, it seems to me. If I had to guess, somewhere around there. But it’s roughly parallel to the prophet Jeremiah, something like that. They say Jeremiah met—those legends—that Jeremiah met whom? Aristotle? Plato? I don’t remember exactly, something like that. I don’t know if the chronology works, but there are such legends, books that bring this, that he taught them everything.
[Speaker D] That strange literature.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, Anaximander writes as follows. He tries to explain a kind of cosmogonic theory, how the world was created. So he says: the world was basically created in the form of opposites that pay one another for their injustice. At the beginning there was some primordial matter, and then opposites were created that pay compensation to one another for their wrongdoing. What I harmed in you, I pay you back correspondingly—some kind of offsets, something like that. I no longer remember the Hebrew translation clearly, only partially. I think Sambursky translated it; in his book The Physical Thought in Its Development he brings various passages like this from writings in the history of science, and there he brings this passage. It’s also in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, in the entry on Anaximander.
In any case, what does that mean? Basically, Anaximander anticipated—with a tet—a very modern idea. He was essentially trying to show how all the diversity that exists in our world can be explained in a very intuitive way. Basically, once things are created in the form of opposites, then—say, in modern language let’s put it this way—the conservation laws are preserved. Right? Modern physics, many argue, can actually provide an explanation for creation ex nihilo. How does creation ex nihilo not violate the conservation laws? They say: it doesn’t violate the conservation laws, because every piece of matter created is created together with antimatter, and therefore overall all quantities are preserved—mass, charge, everything is preserved; nothing new is created. All conservation laws are preserved throughout the process of creation. So that is basically the claim. Say, the creation of particles from vacuum—in quantum field theory they talk about the emergence of particles from vacuum. There too, creation has to happen in such a way that preserves the conservation laws. So when a particle is created, an antiparticle is created along with it, such that the total charge in the world remains the same: if one has positive charge, the other has negative charge. Total mass also remains; if this is positive mass, that is negative mass—meaning that in the end everything cancels out and all the conservation laws hold, that is, they are not broken.
So in that sense Anaximander very interestingly anticipated truly ultra-modern ideas. He basically found a brilliant solution for how the conservation laws are not broken in creation ex nihilo. How creation ex nihilo suddenly becomes something possible from the standpoint of physics. But there is another element in Anaximander: when I first saw this passage, it really bothered me—why did he need it? And that is the element of primordial matter. Meaning, he is basically claiming that in the beginning there was primordial matter, and then—somewhat like a Platonic approach—out of it there somehow split pairs of beings that cancel one another out. Why didn’t he say it came out of the vacuum, like in modern physics? Why does it have to come out of primordial matter? Why not say: there was a vacuum, and then particles and antiparticles emerged, or things that cancel each other out, and all is well—you’ve solved the problem of the conservation laws. Clumsy formulation, of course, but never mind. You solved the problem. What? Everything from positive and negative energy, everything cancels out.
[Speaker B] Are we at a stage where zero is already known? What? Are we at the stage of the number zero?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know whether—he also wasn’t talking quantitatively.
[Speaker B] Is this a breakthrough in thinking of zero as a number?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but you don’t need it here.
[Speaker B] You don’t need it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My modern formulation is like this, because I use conservation laws, where positive and negative cancel to zero, but he didn’t think of it quantitatively. That’s just a formulation I’m giving to his ideas. He said—he recognized that cold and heat together give something lukewarm, meaning there are cancellations. He understood the concept of cancellation before the number zero.
[Speaker B] And what is lukewarm?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but lukewarm—I think he also understood cancellations that nullify one another. He understood that there is such a thing as nothing. I don’t think nullifying cancellation was invented together with zero. Describing that nothing on the number system as part of the numbers—that is a theoretical innovation. But I think nullifying cancellation was definitely understood. Aristotle—clearly—Aristotle himself speaks about a privative negation and an opposing negation. Aristotle himself makes that distinction. There is a negation of zero versus one, and a negation of one versus minus one, whose combination gives zero.
[Speaker B] But the description you just gave—that in creation matter and antimatter are created and overall cancel to zero—is not necessary for this model. One could think that being and anti-being joined to some lukewarm thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning that at the beginning there was something not entirely devoid of properties. But then you haven’t answered the difficulty, because you came to explain the difficulty—how the whole business was created. You have to begin with something that really is nothing. Otherwise I’ll ask you: and how was that thing itself created? If it already contains something in itself, then you haven’t really answered the question; you’ve just moved it one step back. And now the question is: so how was it itself created? Yes, exactly. Therefore somehow primordial matter really is—Plato talks about it—primordial matter is matter devoid of properties. Not lukewarm. Lukewarm in the sense of not cold and not hot and nothing else—not that lukewarm is itself something, but that it is devoid of properties. No properties. These concepts existed before the number zero. The number zero means seeing that thing as a number, and that is an innovation in mathematics. I don’t think it’s an innovation in philosophy. It’s an innovation in mathematics that you can see such a thing as a number and manipulate it like you manipulate numbers. Meaning it functions in equations the same way one, three, minus two do, and zero is there too. That is somehow a theoretical innovation, it seems to me; I’m not sufficiently familiar with the history of the issue.
Now, what bothered me was why Anaximander needed this extra element of primordial matter. And the answer I give is an answer in which I am actually scolding myself. He held up a mirror before me; suddenly I discovered something about myself. How could it be that I didn’t think one had to posit primordial matter? After all, Anaximander is right. The scientific answer doesn’t solve the problem. Suppose I were now to offer you a solution to the problem of creation ex nihilo: the whole world was created in the form of opposites; at the beginning there was a vacuum, and then particles and antiparticles were created, and every thing is offset with properties of this kind and properties of that kind, and everything is offset, no conservation law is broken. Does that solve the problem? The problem of the conservation laws, yes. The philosophical problem? No. Not even that, because in the end the energy also cancels out, so you’d still be missing energy—you need to get to the negative.
[Speaker B] A violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the end nothing is supposed to break here if you offer such an explanation. It answers all the laws. But still one law must be broken: the conservation law of being.
[Speaker E] Where did it come from? Being. Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Before there was nothing, and now suddenly look what a sophisticated and complex world there is. Right, every thing is offset with something else, all the conservation laws are preserved—but philosophically it is unacceptable. Physically there is no problem. Physically, everything is calm. All the conservation laws are preserved. No, none of the conservation laws is broken.
[Speaker B] You’re talking about this probabilistically.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think it’s probabilistic, because it’s hard here to describe what probabilistic even means. Describe your event space to me. I don’t think this can be quantified as probability. Plausibility-wise, yes. It is not philosophically plausible—not scientifically; this is not a question of conservation laws. Rather: how can it be that before there was nothing and now suddenly look, there is all this?
[Speaker D] Including the world of formation. What? The whole world of formation is defined as something that wasn’t there before and now is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Creation. Formation is forms; creation is something that wasn’t there before. Yes. Wait, I’ll come back to that.
[Speaker B] Decrease of entropy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not even that, no. Because entropy too exists only once things already have properties. Without properties there is no thermodynamics. After all, properties begin from the fact that you have energy and velocity and momentum and mass and all kinds of things like that, and then you sum over all the ensembles and all these matters, and out of that you derive temperature. Physics begins in the world of properties. It deals only with properties. Maybe with definition and not only taxonomy, but with properties. Only with Binah, not with Chokhmah.
And therefore what bothered Anaximander was this: he says, look, on the scientific level all the conservation laws are preserved, none is broken, everything is fine, that solves the problem for me. But wait—before there was nothing here, and now look what there is here. The conservation law of being is broken. Before there was not something, and now look at all that there is. How can that be? Now every such being has mass and anti-mass, matter and antimatter, everything is offset, all the conservation laws are preserved. The forms, the characteristics—everything. As far as the characteristics are concerned, I’m all set. Scientific thinking deals with characteristics—with what are called charges. Yes, mass too is a kind of charge from a physicist’s point of view. The mass of a thing is a kind of another sort of charge; there is electric charge, there is gravitational charge—that is mass. Okay? There are other properties of things; they are all basically types of charges. So physics essentially deals with the charges of things, the properties of things. It quantifies the properties, and so on. And therefore conservation laws are also the basic thing in physics, and if they are preserved then the physicist is calm. But physics does not describe all of reality. In reality there is another dimension in relation to which physics is transparent—from the physicist’s standpoint. The physicist doesn’t see it at all. The conservation law of being.
The physicist assumes that there is some being, and if the conservation laws are preserved, then everything is fine. I ask: where does being come from? That too is a conservation law, in a certain sense. And how is it different from the conservation laws of physics? Because physics deals with Binah—with properties, characteristics, charges, what I called earlier. But this law deals with being, with essence, with the thing itself—in the fact that it exists. Right? With existing and not existing. Physics does not touch the question of whether something exists or does not exist; it asks what the properties of what exists are. What energy does it have? It begins immediately from the fact that it exists, and the only question is in what form it exists. But I ask: how does something exist? By the way, this is one of the big problems in this debate between people who think scientifically about the creation of the world and people who think philosophically about the creation of the world. People who think scientifically about creation give explanations that satisfy the laws of physics, for the sake of discussion. They don’t understand that to give a full explanation it is not enough to give an explanation that answers the physical problems. You also need to give an explanation that answers the philosophical problems.
[Speaker B] And therefore they begin after the Big Bang. Right, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s a kind of evasion, exactly. And the point is that they are right—they are just right about part of the picture. Only about the part that deals with the form of the thing. But I ask: how do things exist? In the world of creation, not in the world of formation. How do things exist? Before they weren’t, and now they are. I call it a conservation law just because I’m used to physical language; it’s not a conservation law because it is not the conservation of a property. Being is not a property, as I said before. But one who deals with being is a philosopher, not a physicist. Or a traditional learner, let’s say in our language. Ask a traditional learner, and anyone will tell you: a world that was created can’t have just been created like that out of nothing; some omnipotent being must have done it. That contradicts our intuition. Scientists live with this in peace; people are not at all disturbed by creation ex nihilo—modern scientists, I mean. Therefore many of them tend toward atheism. Why? Because within the scientific outlook they have explanations; they can explain. There are cancellations—exactly Anaximander’s explanations. Where is the mistake? The mistake is that, true, from the physical standpoint, if there is a good explanation then maybe it answers the problems. But physics is only part of the picture. It deals with the properties of things, but I’m asking about the things themselves. A scientist does not ask that. A scientist does not ask about the thing itself, about being. What is the thing in itself? He asks about the properties of the thing, how I grasp it, how I quantify the charges in it. Okay? So this Anaximander is a nice example of looking at a dimension to which science is transparent from the standpoint of the scientific outlook.
[Speaker B] Why did the Sages so strongly oppose—at least according to Maimonides—the claim that the world is eternal, and therefore precisely at this point they opposed the idea of primordial matter?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, I don’t know that they opposed it. Where did they oppose it? That’s how we understand it from Maimonides—that he says the Greeks claim the world is eternal, and we say the world was created. But it could be that it was created from primordial matter. When the Greeks say the world is eternal, that’s not Plato, that’s Aristotle. Plato says the world was primordial—there was primordial matter, and at some stage form was imposed on it. That’s creation. Aristotle talks about an eternal world in the sense that the world as it is today always existed—Aristotle, sorry, it always existed. And that is what Maimonides opposes. Yes. And for example, Maimonides himself, since you asked, brings a midrash from Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer. He says: this is the most astonishing midrash I have encountered in my life—this is what he writes in the Guide for the Perplexed. “From what were the heavens created? From the snow beneath His throne of glory. From what was the earth created? From some such thing.” And Nachmanides was a Neo-Platonist, and in his commentary to Song of Songs he brings this midrash and says that the world was created from something. There was primordial matter, and the creation of the world means making the separation—the “payments for their wrongdoing,” yes, of Anaximander—out of the primordial matter, quarrying out of the primordial matter the diversity we know today. And for him that is his doctrine of creation. In Genesis, by the way, he speaks in a different language—there is a contradiction. In his commentary to Song of Songs—it is in Chavel’s edition, in the two volumes on Nachmanides’ writings—but in his commentary on Genesis, there he speaks of the world being created out of nothing. My claim is that there is not necessarily a contradiction.
I’m a traditional learner, not a scientific one. A scientific learner today says: okay, so Nachmanides contradicts himself, right? I, as a traditional learner—now I’m demonstrating something else. Until now I demonstrated that science deals with properties and traditional, philosophical, non-scientific thought deals with the things themselves. It asks why, it asks what the meaning of being is—not its properties, not the things as they appear to our eyes. Okay? The second characteristic is that science makes distinctions, separations. Science is an analyzing intellect, and the traditional outlook is a unifying intellect, harmonistic, trying to reconcile difficulties, and so on. Therefore, for example, in Talmudic research, when they find a contradiction between two passages, they immediately assign it: this belongs to that school, this belongs to that school, this belongs to that period, this belongs to that period. Again: Tosafot and Maimonides, right? We talked about that. In contrast, traditional learning reconciles these two pieces of evidence. It doesn’t necessarily reconcile them by saying that Maimonides and Tosafot don’t disagree, but it places them within the same context. All in all, they saw two facets of the same topic. And I can show you that this topic really has two facets. That too is a kind of unification of these topics. A scientist doesn’t do that. From a scientist’s point of view, that is speculative thinking. And he is right, by the way, because if he really wants to deal only with precise, judgeable things—I repeat, so you see everything I’m saying now is just saying what I said before in this new language—he deals with judgeable things. Judgeable things are quantitative things that you can set against a test. So here there are two disciplines or two topics; this one assumes this assumption, that one assumes that assumption; there is a contradiction here. That is something very clear, you can quantify it, you can define it, it is completely judgeable. Now the traditional learner comes and proposes a reconciliation to this contradiction. Okay, that may sound logical—but sounding logical also made it sound logical to Aristotle that a stone falls because it strives toward its source. “Sounds logical” is not science. Science is something that stands against a criterion and can be measured against it. Meaning, you make a quantitative claim that is open to judgment. Without a doubt. Yes. Judgment? No, even in the humanities. The aspiration—we talked about this—even the aspiration of the humanities is in the end nevertheless, in some sense, to be scientific. It’s not an exact science, but in some sense to be scientific—to deal with things in a judgeable way. And then I say: they try to focus—the science, the better humanities—is a science that is thinner, that deals with the judgeable things. It tries to classify phenomena and remain detached. Not to offer explanations, not to involve itself in things, but to try as much as possible to do it objectively. That’s hard in the world of the humanities, and therefore it doesn’t always work; it’s not like the natural sciences. But still, the scientific quality there is basically to deal with that and to engage in that. The moment you enter explanations, you’re in the world of speculation. And then it is already traditional learning; it is no longer science. In the humanities, because it is harder to separate these things, that is the meaning of the difficulties I spoke about last time—that in the humanities it is very hard to separate the philosophy of the thing from the thing itself. Unlike in other places where it is much easier. Philosophy of science and science are two entirely different things; no one would even think of mixing them.
[Speaker F] When I said earlier about the story of the frying pan, yes? If that frying pan didn’t exist—meaning it did exist—there was an uncovering of the frying pan, no? So he asks: why not say, in terms of primordial matter too, that if from the standpoint of physics there really is a possibility to create the world as it is, then say: look, just as the frying pan came into being for us, so the world came into being for us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the world was created ex nihilo. But what I’m saying now is precisely not that.
[Speaker F] No, I’m saying: you can’t say it was created ex nihilo. That solves the physical problem, but it doesn’t solve the philosophical problem. I’m saying: if philosophically you managed with the frying pan, why is it a problem for you to manage philosophically with the world in the same way?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, because the pan-cooked offering is not something from nothing; it is something from something. Because the idea existed beforehand. Uncovering, fine, okay. Okay, so that’s it—what I’m saying is that in creation too there is a process of uncovering, and here too there are processes of uncovering, and processes of uncovering are… that’s not creation, they’re uncovering. And that, I argue, is Nachmanides. Now, what I want to say is that even in this topic of creation ex nihilo, I can reconcile these two statements of Nachmanides with each other. My claim is that Nachmanides, unlike Plato, maintains that primordial matter was also created. It’s just that creation happened in two stages. In the first stage He created primordial matter, and then after there was primordial matter, two pairs of components were separated from it, or hewn out of it, which offset one another. Okay. Now, Nachmanides was not troubled, as Plato was, by how primordial matter came into being, because there is the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Speaker G] If so, then why do you need that stage at all—why do you need this whole stage of primordial matter? Why? Why do you need this stage of primordial matter? Why not go directly to formation? To creation?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because Nachmanides understood that apparently—this is what he writes there—that creation involving a violation of conservation laws is something impossible; for him it’s a logical violation, not a physical one.
[Speaker G] No, you can create without violating conservation laws. After all, you’re not violating anything when you make creation out of primordial matter; you’re not changing… No, right. So why do you need primordial matter at all?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because otherwise, how does matter itself come into being prior to its properties?
[Speaker G] How does matter itself come into being? But now that there’s a creation of matter, then how does matter itself come into being?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying: the philosophical conservation laws—the law of conservation of being—Nachmanides attributes to the Holy One, blessed be He. So the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world something from nothing; He created primordial matter. From that point on, everything is physics. Physics allows separation by way of the offsetting of properties. Only the creation of primordial matter is the one deviation Nachmanides allows himself. I really don’t know why specifically he prefers that, and why he thinks that creation… He writes that creation ex nihilo is a logical contradiction, that creation ex nihilo is impossible. But why? What, the Holy One, blessed be He, can’t create something from nothing? But that’s how he understood it; I don’t know exactly why. But that’s how he understood it—that creation ex nihilo is simply impossible, philosophically impossible. Meaning, he doesn’t understand this as a problem in physics; it’s a problem in philosophy. It’s something that he… I don’t know. To understand what he means, you have to step into his shoes. But I’m saying, here I’ve already demonstrated the second characteristic, which I see I still didn’t manage to get to today. The characteristic of the separating versus the unifying. Until now I demonstrated the difference between whether you deal with the things themselves or with their properties. Right? The second characteristic is whether your engagement is a separating one or a unifying one. Okay. So here I’ll demonstrate it only briefly using this very passage of Nachmanides. I’m saying that in Nachmanides himself—now, someone else would say: there’s a contradiction in Nachmanides. So either it’s a mistake, or he changed his mind, or it’s a different manuscript and it’s not Nachmanides at all, it’s someone else and it got inserted. All kinds of academic solutions to this sort of contradiction. Right? That’s how academia solves this kind of contradiction. And it’s right, because from its perspective, when there is a contradiction, that requires an answer on the level of the phenomena. But I’m saying, wait a second—let’s step into Nachmanides’ shoes, into the way he thought, and try to find a synthesis in which these two things somehow fit together. That’s not scientific thinking; it’s not testable. Maybe you’re right, maybe not—you can’t put it to the test. A nice idea, nice little insights. A scientist can’t do such a thing. So he’s right from his perspective and I’m right from mine. This is traditional learning and this is scientific learning, and by the way, that’s not a criticism. It’s not a criticism, because if you really want to advance scientific thinking, you have to thin it out. Focus only on those things that are quantifiable and testable, and that can be developed in a universal way, and that when I say them everyone will agree. Because with my nice insights, you won’t agree; you’ll have different insights. So that’s why it isn’t science—you can’t deal with that. I’m not saying it isn’t true, but it isn’t science; it isn’t the objective dimension on which we will all agree. And science tries to focus on the thing on which we will all agree, as much as possible at least. Okay? And therefore I think that this dimension too—the separating versus the unifying—also really distinguishes between scientific thinking and traditional thinking. Because traditional thinking is more speculative. Scientific thinking is strict about testability, precise definitions, standing up to empirical testing, comparisons. I very much want to stay attached to the phenomena; I have to be grounded. That is both the drawback and the great advantage of this kind of thinking. Okay? Next time I’ll try to show how these two things can be used as one structure, so that one does not negate the other, but on the contrary, together they create some kind of complete picture. To make a synthesis, exactly. On the synthetic versus the analytic approach—to make a synthesis between them.