Doubt and Probability—in Halacha, in Thought, and in General—Lesson 19—Rabbi Michael Abraham
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- The presumption established by three occurrences, and a majority not present before us versus a majority present before us
- The problem of generalization and induction in David Hume
- The example of the sunrise and the circularity in justifying induction
- Kant, the dogmatic slumber, and the problem of the synthetic a priori
- Asa Kasher’s remark, “theology,” and pragmatism versus an argument from intuition
- Kant’s solution: noumenon and phenomenon, and transcendental arguments
- Criticism of Kant and a return to Hume’s problem
- Intuition as a cognitive sense and the justification for trusting generalizations
- The distinction between intuition and emotion, and the example of mathematics
- Questions about biases, probability, Kahneman and Tversky, and the impossibility of acting without intuition
- Class discussion on morality, compassion, revenge, and emotion versus cognition
- Rabbi Shach’s remark and the Entebbe operation as an example of the distinction between actual success and prior justification
Summary
General Overview
The text presents the distinction between a majority not present before us and a majority present before us through the idea of induction and the presumption established by three occurrences, and argues that the dispute over the “strength” of a majority not present before us is connected to the question of how the distribution on which the majority relies is created. It presents David Hume’s critique of the justification of generalization, of the principle of causality, and of the very possibility of justifying general laws from observations, and shows how Kant formulates this as the problem of “how synthetic a priori judgments are possible” and offers a solution through the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. It then argues that Kant’s solution does not hold up, and that on the philosophical level there remains a fundamental problem in justifying trust in science and in generalizations, with the central proposal being to view intuition as a cognitive sense rather than as merely a tool of thought. Throughout the discussion, questions arise about the weight of intuition versus emotion, about the possibility of testing and the effects of bias, and about the implications for morality and practical judgment.
The Presumption Established by Three Occurrences, and a Majority Not Present Before Us versus a Majority Present Before Us
The text argues that the presumption established by three occurrences demonstrates how a majority not present before us is formed from a sample of events and the inference of a general rule, as is done in scientific generalizations. It says that the problems in the process of generalization are the source of the weakness of a majority not present before us, and that in Chullin it appears that a majority not present before us is weaker than a majority present before us, because even if a majority present before us is learned from “follow the majority,” a majority not present before us still remains an open question. It notes that Rabbi Shimon Shkop proves that according to Maimonides the opposite may be true, that a majority not present before us is actually stronger, and says that this may also be implied by Rashi. It sets out a framework in which both types of majority look like statistics, but the difference lies in the way the distribution is formed: in a majority not present before us, through generalization from a sample; and in a majority present before us, through reasoning from a given situation in which “the whole reality is known.”
The Problem of Generalization and Induction in David Hume
The text presents David Hume’s claim that the move from a sample to a general law is unjustified, because the assumption that the sample represents a general law cannot itself be justified empirically. It defines Hume as an empiricist who accepts knowledge of the world only through observation, and therefore rejects tools that have no empirical basis. It explains that Hume raises two central problems: causality and induction. It argues that in causality, observation itself contains no perception of a causal connection, only temporal conjunction, and therefore the attribution of “because of” is not derived from the senses. It adds that even if there were cases in which “we became convinced” of a causal connection, the leap from private experiences to a general law—“everything has a cause”—rests on induction, which has no empirical basis.
The Example of the Sunrise and the Circularity in Justifying Induction
The text uses the example that the sun has risen until today to show that this gives no proof that it will also rise tomorrow, and explains that relying on causality—“the Earth rotates”—does not solve the problem, because causality is itself problematic, and the assumption that the rotation will continue is yet another induction. It argues that trying to justify induction by saying “it works” is circular, because it bases trust in induction on an induction from past successes. It presents Hume’s problems as undermining our ability to understand the world in the sense of formulating laws of nature, and attributes central importance to this in modern science, which is seen as resting on observation.
Kant, the Dogmatic Slumber, and the Problem of the Synthetic A Priori
The text says that Hume’s problems “awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber,” and that Kant seeks a justification for principles that are not learned from experience but nevertheless underlie everyday cognition and science. It presents Kant’s two distinctions: analytic versus synthetic on the logical axis, and a priori versus a posteriori on the epistemic axis, and describes how before Kant people thought the divisions overlapped, so that every analytic judgment was a priori and every synthetic judgment was a posteriori. It argues that Kant recognized that laws of nature such as the law of gravitation are synthetic, but cannot be justified as the product of observation alone because of Hume’s problem, and therefore a category of synthetic a priori judgments emerges. It formulates Hume’s problems as one question: “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” and emphasizes that Kant asks “how are they possible,” not “whether they are possible,” because he sees the laws of nature as a fact in which people place trust even without philosophical justification.
Asa Kasher’s Remark, “Theology,” and Pragmatism versus an Argument from Intuition
The text cites, in the name of Asa Kasher, a distinction: a philosopher “takes premises and derives conclusions from them,” whereas a theologian “takes conclusions and derives premises from them,” and argues that since Kant, philosophers too have been making a move from the conclusion to the premises. It distinguishes between a pragmatist argument in which “the desirable determines the actual,” such as “without belief in God there is no morality, therefore there is a God,” and an argument in which the starting point is a genuine intuition that morality is binding, from which one derives a conclusion about the existence of God if one accepts the premise that without God there is no moral obligation. It presents the difference as subtle but fundamental: not a desire that the world be this way, but a binding belief in intuition as a claim about truth. It emphasizes that logic derives conclusions from premises but does not supply the premises, and argues that premises come either from intuition or from observation, while also saying that observation supplies only a particular case, and that the “interesting” claim is the general law, which is not the product of observation alone.
Kant’s Solution: Noumenon and Phenomenon, and Transcendental Arguments
The text presents Kant’s solution: science deals not with the world “as it is in itself” but with the world as it appears to us, and from here comes the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. It argues that when laws of nature describe the appearance of phenomena to us, one can understand how it is possible to know something “a priori” through knowledge of the cognitive tools that shape that appearance. It gives the analogy of looking through red cellophane, which makes it possible to know in advance that everything will look red even though the statement “the ball is red” is synthetic. It calls these transcendental arguments derived from familiarity with the tools of cognition, and emphasizes that the conclusions are valid with respect to the way things appear to us, not with respect to the world as it is in itself.
Criticism of Kant and a Return to Hume’s Problem
The text argues that Kant’s solution leads to the difficulty that phenomena which do not fit our conceptions will not be examined or will not be seen, and therefore the solution “doesn’t hold water.” It gives the example that Newton’s true law might have been different—for example, dependent on the square of acceleration—and asks why we would not see a different acceleration if it really existed, arguing that it makes no sense that the tools of cognition would “prevent” us from seeing contradictory data. It presents a classroom discussion in which it is argued that even if we are dealing only with phenomenon, Hume’s question still remains regarding the justification of generalization from the past to the future, and it raises the possibility of change in the person himself—“who says your eyesight itself isn’t changing?” It concludes that on the philosophical level we are still left “with a broken trough,” and that trust in science exists, but a full philosophical justification has not been found.
Intuition as a Cognitive Sense and the Justification for Trusting Generalizations
The text proposes that the only way to justify trust in generalizations and in science is to view intuition not as a thinking tool but as a cognitive tool, a “sixth sense,” a way of looking at the world “with the eyes of the intellect.” It argues that if intuition is an interaction with the world and not a detached internal process, then there is no problem of fit between thought and world, because there is a kind of “seeing” of the general law behind the particular cases. It says that in that case generalization is not an unjustified leap from a sample to a law, but a direct grasp of a general rule through the particular cases. It compares this to trust in the ordinary senses, and argues that just as one can cast doubt on eyesight, so one can cast doubt on intuition; but anyone who accepts the senses as reliable can also accept intuition as a legitimate tool, even if only with limited confidence and with controls.
The Distinction Between Intuition and Emotion, and the Example of Mathematics
The text distinguishes between emotion as a personal feeling that is not a matter of true or false, and intuition as a perception that yields a true claim about the world, one that can be tested. It gives the example of solving a mathematical problem where someone says, “I had a feeling that it was eight,” and argues that this is really intuition, because there is a possibility of testing and deciding between “eight” and “nine.” It rejects the idea that in emotion there is no argument, and emphasizes that with intuition there is an argument, because one person is right and the other is wrong. It argues that the weight of intuition is determined partly by consistent testing, and that intuitions that cannot be tested do not gain validity merely from the claim that there is an intuition.
Questions About Biases, Probability, Kahneman and Tversky, and the Impossibility of Acting Without Intuition
The text addresses a claim from the field of investments based on the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which shows that acting from intuition produces biases, and responds that there are indeed fields in which intuitions mislead, and therefore controls and cross-checks are needed. It argues that there is no field in which one can act without intuition, and that even an attempt to “build a robot with no intuition” would still embody the intuitions of its builder. It expresses doubt about the attempt to “prove Hume wrong” from the fact that in practice inductions work, and rejects this as the circularity of “an induction about inductions.” It adds that Hume does not accept a probabilistic justification if it rests on the very same principle, and concludes by saying that empiricism, which accepts the senses but rejects laws, seems illogical to him, while the alternatives are either complete skepticism or accepting intuition as a cognitive sense.
Class Discussion on Morality, Compassion, Revenge, and Emotion versus Cognition
The text includes a lengthy argument among the participants about the place of emotion and compassion in moral judgment, including the claim that the problem is not emotion but understanding, and the opposing claim that the emotional dimension is the central one, and that without it moral decline follows. It presents an objection to letting an emotion like compassion or revenge “run” one’s actions, and on the other hand the argument that a lack of compassion is perceived as a moral disgrace and a failure of conscience. The discussion spills over into current events surrounding Gaza, with claims about revenge, compassion, “when the wicked perish there is rejoicing,” and a dispute over the degree of rationality or emotionality that drives decisions, while the lecturer insists that conduct should be based on “what is right to do” and not on emotions. At the end of the argument, the lecturer returns to the central claim that the disagreement stems from a confusion between emotion and intuition, and concludes with “Shabbat shalom.”
Rabbi Shach’s Remark and the Entebbe Operation as an Example of the Distinction Between Actual Success and Prior Justification
The text gives an example from a letter by Rabbi Shach about the Entebbe operation, in which he opposed the operation before it was carried out because of the low chances of success and the risk to the soldiers, and after its success said that he had not claimed it would not succeed, only that the chances were small. It uses this to argue that success in practice does not refute an earlier assessment of probability, and that many questions are evaluative and strategic, not merely factual. It concludes with the example of a fair die that came up six four times in a row, to say that even a rare run of successes does not prove a new law, and that after a very long streak, the problem may lie in the assumption that the die is fair or in the testing.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time we finished the issue of a presumption established after three occurrences, and the context was an attempt to show how induction works, while in the background we saw that a majority not present before us is basically a kind of generalization from a sample, or induction. And through the presumption of three times, and its limitations and qualifications and so on, you could get a sense of why a majority not present before us really does suffer from problems, why it’s not so simple to just follow a majority not present before us. And I remind you that in the Talmudic text in Hullin, the plain sense of the Talmudic text is that a majority not present before us is weaker than a majority present before us, because the Talmudic text there says that even if a majority present before us we learn from “follow the majority,” a majority not present before us still remains an open question. So that means it’s apparently viewed as weaker than a majority present before us. I already mentioned that Rabbi Shimon Shkop proves that according to Maimonides it’s the opposite, that a majority not present before us is the stronger one, and I said that maybe that’s the conclusion of the passage according to Rashi there, one of the possibilities in Rashi. In any case, in order to understand, or sharpen more, the differences between a majority present before us and a majority not present before us, the presumption of three times actually taught us how a majority not present before us is formed. A majority not present before us is formed by our seeing a sample of events, of occurrences, and inferring from them a general law, just as we make generalizations in scientific research. And the scientific law that comes out of the generalization is basically the majority not present before us. And the problems that accompany the generalization are basically the weakness of the majority not present before us. That was essentially the claim. On the other hand, I think we have a fairly strong kind of trust in scientific generalizations. Meaning, scientific generalizations, despite all the problems with the way we arrive at them, those generalizations, the scientific laws, what is produced by the generalization, are specifically perceived as things that are strong. Maybe even stronger than some local majority like the majority of stores, or a majority in a religious court, or something like that. And that fits better with what we saw in the position of Maimonides, that a majority not present before us is the stronger one. I said, again, the Talmudic text still has to be worked out, but among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) it’s a dispute which is stronger. So now I want to try to go a bit more deeply into the matter of a majority not present before us, and afterward compare it to a majority present before us, in order to see what exactly the issue is. I’ll say in one line what I’m aiming at so we don’t lose the connecting thread. In the end, whether I have a majority present before us or a majority not present before us, it all looks like statistics. Probability, statistics. Meaning, in the end we have some distribution, some majority, sixty percent, eighty percent, ninety percent in favor of one side and the rest in favor of the other side, and we decide in favor of the side supported by the majority. That looks like a statistical, probabilistic consideration. The difference between a majority present before us and a majority not present before us is the question of how that majority was formed, or how that distribution was formed, on which we base the probabilistic consideration. And here there is a difference. In a majority not present before us, it is formed by generalizing from a sample, while in a majority present before us it is formed by some given situation that stands before me, and we saw that this is not really something that can be put to experiment, it’s not something that can really be tested, but there is some reasoning that comes out of an immediate acquaintance with the situation. So the difference between the two kinds of majority is the question of how the distribution was formed. In the end there is a distribution and people use statistics, but the question of how the distribution came into being is really the question that distinguishes between these two things, and I explained why a majority in a religious court and a majority of stores are similar, because in both cases this is not a majority formed by generalization from a sample. In both cases it’s a majority formed by some reasoning when I stand before a reality all of which is known to me. I’ll come back to that point too, but I want for the moment to get into the majority not present before us, and then I’ll return to the majority present before us. As we saw, the basic problem that accompanies a majority not present before us is really the problem of generalization, and the question that lies behind the skepticism regarding a majority not present before us is what justifies making a generalization. Meaning, who says that this sample is representative, or who says that one can generalize on the basis of this sample and that the law we arrive at really describes reality correctly. The process of generalization is basically the problematic process. Now I want to sharpen a bit the difficulty involved in generalizations. I’ll enter into Hume’s problem, yes, the problem of induction, and try to answer it, and from that try to understand better the majority not present before us as against the majority present before us. So, Hume in practice claimed that generalizations are baseless. I mean, what do I mean by baseless? We have a sample on which we rely; that’s the basis. But the justification for moving from the basis to the general law is itself unjustified. Meaning, it has no justification. What we saw, we saw. The sample that we saw, we saw. But the assumption that this sample reflects a general law, something that happens in reality in general, always, everywhere, that is baseless. What stands behind this claim of David Hume is his being an empiricist. David Hume was an empiricist, and empiricists are basically people who hold a view according to which learning about the world can be done only by observation. Meaning, if it doesn’t come from observation, I can’t use it to say something about the world or to know the world. That is the empiricist position. And therefore David Hume argues that there are all kinds of things that somehow we’ve gotten used to seeing as tools for knowing the world, but the truth is that they have no empirical basis, and he, as an empiricist, if there is no empirical basis, is unwilling to accept them. Now the two best-known problems of David Hume are causality and induction. Causality is basically the principle that says that everything must have a cause, which is a general principle. And this principle ostensibly comes from experience. What does that mean? We saw various cases in which things that happened had a cause. From that we make a generalization and say that everything must have a cause. That is the principle of causality. David Hume says that here the problem is twofold. First, in no case can we actually see that there is a causal relation between two events, that event A is the cause of event B. We have no ability to extract such a thing through observation. Yes, when I kick a ball and the ball flies, we usually assume that the kick was the factor, the cause, of the ball’s flight. But that assumption does not come out of the observation. In the observation we see that we kicked, and we see that after we kicked the ball also flew. But the assumption that the ball flew because of the kick, meaning the connection between the kick and the ball’s flight, has no empirical basis. You can’t see that with your eyes when you observe reality. It’s a conclusion we infer, but you can’t really see it. And conclusions are nice, but yes, as Mark Twain said, the world owes you nothing; it was here before you. Meaning, the fact that you think in a certain way says nothing about whether the world also behaves that way. The fact that you’re used to thinking in a certain way—so what? Therefore, if you see something, if you observe something, okay, then you can understand that this is probably what happens in the world. And the assumption of the empiricists is that the senses are beyond all doubt, yes, the senses clearly reflect reality correctly. There were philosophers who cast doubt even on that. But that they do accept as a reliable tool, but only the senses. Meaning, what you observe—that you can know about the world. Any conclusion you draw beyond that is your own private responsibility. You can’t rely on that conclusion. You may be used to thinking that way, our thought is built that way, but that’s our problem. Meaning, there is no justification for thinking that this is also what happens in the world. That was David Hume’s claim regarding causality. So first of all, in every specific event we observed, the conclusion that there really was a causal relation between events is our conclusion; it has no empirical basis. And on top of that David Hume says: even if there were an empirical basis for particular events we observed, the leap from the events we observed to a general law that says that everything must have a cause—not the particular event I observed, let’s say there I was convinced that there really is a causal relation, although Hume doesn’t accept even that. But let’s say there I was convinced. Now the question is whether I can derive from that a general law that everything must have a cause, that there is no event without a cause. That leap too is problematic, says Hume. Not only is the decoding of the sample itself problematic; the leap is problematic. Why? Here enters the problem of induction. The problem of induction basically says, according to David Hume, that we are used to thinking that what has been will be. If we saw something happen in one case or another, apparently that is some general law. And our assumption that everything that happens in the world is really particular cases of general laws—that is one assumption. And the second assumption is that we also have a way to get from the particular cases to the general laws; that is another assumption. And these two assumptions basically have no empirical basis. Meaning, we have no way to justify these assumptions, and therefore our leap from a sample to a general law is an unjustified leap. The fact that the sun has risen every morning until now does not mean that tomorrow morning it will also rise. Who says? Meaning, what happened until now happened—who says it will continue to happen afterward? So very often—and David Hume himself addresses this—very often people try to explain this on the basis of the principle of causality. What does that mean? The principle of causality basically says: why does the sun really rise every morning? Because the earth rotates. And if the earth rotates, then every morning we meet the sun again, and that’s what we call sunrise. So we have a cause, the rotation of the earth. But of course that doesn’t solve the problem. First, because we don’t know that this is the cause, because the concept of causality itself is problematic. Second, who says that the earth will continue to rotate? Meaning, if it rotated until now, who says it will continue rotating? You’re still making an induction here; you haven’t escaped the problem of induction. There are those who want to answer that the problem of induction—that is, we rely on inductions because we have experience that it really works. Meaning, our past experience taught us that our generalizations work. Not always, but in many cases; meaning it’s a tool that carries significant weight, it’s not just a shot in the dark. But of course that is a circular justification, because you’re basically basing your trust in induction on induction, on cases you encountered in the past where your generalizations worked. But if you have a problem with induction, you can’t rely on induction, on generalization, in order to justify your trust in inductions. Therefore this cannot serve as a philosophical justification for induction. And so that is basically the problem that David Hume presented, the problems David Hume presented. And again, as an empiricist—and I think in the modern era this was already accepted almost as self-evident, that you can’t learn about the world except through observation—the whole of modern science basically rests on this mode of thought, or at least thinks it rests on this mode of thought. And therefore David Hume’s problems are really problems that undermine our whole ability to understand the world, to arrive at general laws about the world. That is what we call understanding. Understanding means understanding the laws of nature and understanding the phenomena as basically the specific appearances of the laws of nature, yes? The particular cases of the laws of nature. So that was the problem. Now, David Hume’s problem is what awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber, as he himself describes it, and indeed he says: listen, there’s some problem here that we must find a solution for, since all our ability to know the world, all science—but not only science, also our everyday recognition of the world—is based essentially on these two principles, causality and induction, maybe a few others, but all these principles are principles that we do not themselves learn from experience. And the question is: what justification do we have for trusting them? Why use them at all? What can be the rational basis for using this toolbox? And then Kant basically proposes a reanalysis of the problem. Again, there were all kinds of attempts to answer these problems of David Hume, and none of them really succeeds. Meaning, there is no justification; no one found a justification. There is a chapter in a book by Hugo Bergmann. It’s like an introduction to epistemology, chapter 9, called “The Rationality of the World,” yes, the world’s fit with reason, the rationality of the world. And there he basically talks about Hume’s basic problem, the basic problem of epistemology, how I can know the world, and he goes through all the solutions proposed to it over the history of philosophy, yes, all the proposed solutions, and he rejects all of them. Meaning, he shows that none of them really solves the problem. The only solution that some people still believe in is Kant’s solution. And Kant’s solution basically works like this. Kant says: let’s try to analyze, to restate, Hume’s problems, as a good philosopher does. You didn’t ask the question properly; let’s ask the question better before we look for an answer. So he basically draws a distinction between different kinds of judgments, two distinctions. One distinction lies on the logical axis, and it is the distinction between synthetic judgments and analytic judgments. Analytic judgments are judgments that basically constitute an analysis of the concepts involved in them. Yes, say, this ball is round. So he says that’s an analytic judgment, because being round is part of the definition of a ball, and then analysis of the concept ball will yield for you the claim that the ball is round. Or, an unmarried man has no wife. That is an analytic judgment, because analysis of the concept unmarried man basically tells you that if the person is unmarried, then he has no wife. So those are analytic claims. Synthetic claims are claims that require additional information beyond the information contained in the concepts themselves. If I say this man’s name is Yaakov, or this man is married, that is a synthetic claim, because from his being a man it does not follow that he is married, nor that his name is Yaakov. Right, I need additional information here beyond the information embedded in the definition of the concepts. Therefore I make a synthesis with additional information, and therefore those are synthetic claims. Analytic claims require no information except the information embedded in the concepts. Analyze the concepts, understand the claim, know the claim, and you will conclude that this claim is true. Synthetic claims require a synthesis with additional information beyond the information found in the definitions of the concepts themselves. So that is one distinction between claims, analytic and synthetic claims, and that distinction is on the logical axis, the logical structure of the judgment. Is this judgment an analysis of the concepts involved in it, or is there something beyond analysis here? There is another distinction between kinds of judgments or kinds of claims, and that is a distinction on the epistemic axis, the axis of cognition. How do I know this judgment? And here I distinguish between a priori and a posteriori. An a priori claim is a claim that I know without experience; I can know it without observations, without using empirical tools. And an a posteriori claim is a claim for which I need experience in order to know it. Okay? Now this distinction is not a distinction that belongs to the logic of the judgment; it is a distinction that touches on the question of how I know the judgment. Meaning, it talks about me, about my cognition of these claims. How do I know this claim—do I need observation, or can I know it without observation? So the first distinction is on the logical axis: what is the structure of the judgment? The second distinction is on the epistemic axis, the axis of cognition: how do I know that this judgment is true, or how do I know this claim? So these are two distinctions, two different distinctions, that divide claims into two kinds. In principle, if I use the two distinctions, the division of claims is actually into four kinds. There are analytic a priori claims, analytic a posteriori claims, synthetic a priori claims, and synthetic a posteriori claims. Yes, two divisions, each one into two categories, so if they are independent then they give me a division into four categories. Okay? Yes, a division between cold and hot and day and night, so I say there is a cold day and a hot day, a cold night and a hot night. That is four categories if I have two divisions each of which has two sides. And if they are independent, then it creates a division into four categories, four possibilities. Here too it’s the same. Except that when you look at the claims themselves and try to classify them, you discover, to your surprise—and that’s what people thought until Kant—that these divisions look different, but in fact they are identical. Every judgment that is analytic is a priori, and every judgment that is a priori is analytic. Meaning, the divisions are identical, and consequently synthetic is a posteriori and a posteriori is synthetic. And these divisions look at the existing claims in the world from different angles, but in the end the division they make is the same division. Try, for example, to think about the claim, the claims I gave earlier: the unmarried man is not married. So it’s an analytic claim, but of course it is also a priori. Right? It is a priori because I don’t need observation to know that the unmarried man is not married; I can know that even without observing. Now there is also logic behind this identity. What is the logic? If it follows from an analysis of the concepts, then clearly I don’t need observation; all I need is just to analyze the concepts, assuming I know the concepts. So therefore, once it is analytic, observation is not needed; it will also be a priori. But why, if it is a priori, must it also be analytic? Here too there is simple logic there. If this thing is a priori, then what does that mean? I know it without observation. Now ask yourselves how I can really know something without observation. If there is some information there beyond what is embedded in the concepts themselves, then how do I know it? How does it come to my knowledge? Necessarily I need observation. If I know this claim without observation, that means there is no information there beyond the very definition of the concepts. Which means that if a judgment is a priori, then it is also analytic. And therefore these two divisions are really one and the same division, maybe from different angles, but it is the same division itself. Every judgment that is analytic is a priori, and every judgment that is synthetic is a posteriori, and vice versa. That is how people thought until Kant. Now Kant says the following. Let’s look at a certain law of nature, say the law of gravitation. Now let’s try to classify the law of gravitation and see where it belongs. Does the law of gravitation—which says every two bodies with mass attract one another with a certain force whose formula we know—that is the law of gravitation. Is it an analytic law? Obviously not. Meaning, analysis of the concept of mass and attraction, without observations, without additional information, will not give me this law that every two masses attract each other. The fact is that before Newton no one thought that was the case. Therefore this law is not an analytic claim. Is it a synthetic claim? I would expect it to be a posteriori. Meaning, if there is information here beyond what is embedded in the definitions of the concepts, then I would expect that we would need observation in order to know it. Meaning, that it would be an a posteriori claim. Is that really so? In simple terms, no. It is not an a posteriori claim. Why? Because of Hume’s problems. What does Hume say? The information I get from observation is not enough to justify the general law. There is a step of generalization on the way, and that generalization has no empirical basis. Therefore, observations do not yield this judgment. You can’t say that this judgment is a posteriori. Now notice, this is a bit subtle, because I do make observations on the way to a law of nature. A law of nature begins with observations of particular cases that form a sample, and then I make a generalization and derive from that a law of nature. But the observations are a necessary condition, maybe a necessary one, but not a sufficient one. Meaning, the observations alone will not give me the law of nature. I also need to assume that there is a generalization here, that these observations are a representative sample, and that this is what happens in general in all cases. And that generalization is not an empirical act, not an act based on observation, as we saw earlier, because induction is a mental process; it has no observational basis. And therefore it turns out that the laws of nature, the general laws that science discovers, are on the one hand synthetic claims, not analytic; on the other hand, they are a priori claims. They are not claims I can extract from observations. I use observations, but the observations are not enough to give me those claims. I have to perform an additional act of thought that will lead me from the observations to the general law. Which means: an empiricist will not be able to accept this. Someone who relies only on observations and is not willing to accept principles of thought as tools for knowing the world will not be able to accept this law. This is not an empirical law. Kant says: basically a problem is created here, which he calls the problem of the synthetic a priori. The laws of nature—and many other claims too, but the laws of nature are the clearest example of this—are basically claims that are synthetic and a priori. Now, I remind you that such a category did not really exist before Kant. Because every synthetic is a posteriori and every analytic is a priori. There is no combination of synthetic and a priori. A priori cannot be synthetic; it has to be analytic. Kant says, wait a second, everything is correct from the perspective of conceptual analysis. But as a matter of fact, we believe in very many claims that are synthetic a priori claims. They are both synthetic and a priori. The laws of nature, for example. Kant says: actually, this problem of the synthetic a priori is the more general formulation of the whole collection of problems raised by David Hume. The problem of induction, the problem of causality, all the problems David Hume raised can actually be translated into a more general form: this is basically the problem of the synthetic a priori. Because what does the problem of the synthetic a priori say? It says that, ostensibly, it cannot be—or at least we need to understand what justifies it—that I arrive at synthetic claims, meaning claims that contain information about the world, not only what is embedded in the definitions of the concepts, and I arrive at them without observation. It can’t be that I hold information about the world that is not based on observation. That is a translation into plain language of the problem of the synthetic a priori. The problem of the synthetic a priori basically says: how can it be that I hold information about the world that is not based on observation? So then where do I know it from, if not from observation? From the way I think? The fact that I think that way doesn’t mean that that is how the world behaves. So what if I think that way? Who says that what I think really describes what is happening in the world? Yes? Mark Twain. So basically all of David Hume’s problems—causality, induction, and maybe others too—basically converge, or can be formulated, in one general formulation: how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? That is basically Kant’s formulation of Hume’s problems. And you understand that this is basically a philosophical formulation of the same problem we’ve been dealing with for several classes now. The question is how we can believe our generalizations. How can we take a generalization, which is an act of thought, and the result of the generalization, the general law we arrived at, we assume really describes what happens in the world, meaning that it contains information about the world. How did we accumulate this information if not from observation? Therefore Kant basically formulated this problem in a more precise and conceptualized way. How can one accumulate information about the world without observation? What justifies generalizations? That is basically his formulation. Now, when Kant asked this question, he did not ask whether synthetic a priori judgments are possible, but rather how synthetic a priori judgments are possible. This is a distinction that many of his commentators noticed, but I don’t think they fully understood its very, very broad significance. My fourth talk in The First Commonplace is basically entirely devoted to this. But Kant’s claim is that synthetic a priori judgments are a fact. I do not doubt the laws of nature or my scientific tools. I don’t know what the philosophical justification is. I am not asking whether synthetic a priori judgments are possible, but how it is possible that they are possible. Clearly they are possible, and they are here. I believe the laws of nature; I am perplexed because I can’t find a philosophical justification for them. Therefore he does not ask whether they are possible, but how they are possible. And this is a very interesting point because I’ll just say this in one sentence; it doesn’t directly concern us. Once I heard in some philosophy course—once I heard in a philosophy course I attended, it was Asa Kasher—he said there once: what is the difference between a philosopher and a theologian? He says: a philosopher takes premises and derives conclusions from them, and the theologian takes conclusions and derives premises from them. Meaning, yes, the theologian assumes that there is God and then looks for the premises that will build a proof for God’s existence. Meaning, he does not arrive at the conclusion that God exists because of his argument; he starts from the fact that God exists, he assumes the conclusion, and then he tries to build an argument that will prove it. Meaning, he takes the conclusion and derives premises from it. And the philosopher is supposedly a more straightforward person; he has the premises and he looks at what conclusion comes out, he is not willing to shoot the arrows and then draw the target around them. Meaning, he does not begin with conclusions and then look for the premises that lead to them. Okay? So that’s a joke at the theologian’s expense. But since Kant—and as a philosopher I would expect him to know this, as a professor of philosophy, whether he’s a philosopher or not is another question—since Kant, philosophers too are basically theologians. Here in our case, Kant basically says: synthetic a priori judgments are possible, period. That’s the conclusion. But I don’t know how. I am looking for the premises that will build an argument justifying that conclusion. Meaning, he is acting like a theologian—not with respect to God, but the way he operates is basically: I desire the main point of this conclusion, and I look for premises that will lead to it or justify it. Okay? Which is exactly what they accuse the theologian of. Since Kant, everyone should understand that philosophers too do the same thing. There is no real difference. In any case, that’s what Kant asked. Now maybe I’ll sharpen one more point that later it will become clear why it is important. There are situations in which I accept this criticism. These are situations of what is called pragmatism. What does that mean? For example, there are people who say: look, without belief in God people won’t behave morally, therefore there is a God. That claim is a pragmatist claim. What does that mean? I desire the main point of the moral conclusion, I want people to be committed to morality, so I create, I invent God in order to justify morality, in order for people to be committed to morality. That is of course nonsense, philosophical nonsense, right? Because the fact that you desire morality does not mean there is a God. Either there is a God or there isn’t. The fact that God is useful to you does not mean that God really exists. What is desirable does not dictate what exists. From the standpoint of the pragmatists—pragmatism is an American view, in American philosophy, not American pragmatism in the marketplace but in the marketplace of ideas—the pragmatists basically say that the desirable determines the real. Part of this is some kind of despair over the ability to arrive at what is true, and then it says, okay, so let’s choose as true what is useful to me. I think American pragmatism is one of the precursors of postmodernism. In any case, that argument is of course absurd. Meaning, yes, you tell a person: look, your life will be wonderful, you’ll have a wonderful family life, so it’s worthwhile for you to repent. That’s unrelated. If I don’t believe in God, then even if I accept that my family life will be wonderful, so what? I can’t repent and believe that there is a God because family life is wonderful. Meaning, if I don’t.
[Speaker B] A whole book by Shalom Tzadok, a professor recently.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I don’t know his book; I know his approach, and indeed his approach is like that, and it really is absurd, right. In any case, I want to distinguish between that and another argument that is very similar, but there is an essential difference between them. Back to morality. If I claim that morality is not binding without God, that is a philosophical claim, which is basically what underlies the pragmatic argument. But the pragmatist, on top of that claim, says: yes, and I want people to be committed to morality, so let’s invent God, because without Him people won’t be committed to morality. That is a pragmatist argument. I say: without God there is no obligation to morality—I can agree. But what I add is not that I want people to be committed to morality, but that I claim that people really are committed to morality. I have such an intuition that says that morality is something binding. And now I ask myself: wait a second, but without God that cannot be true, because without God there is no binding morality, so apparently there is a God. A very similar argument to the pragmatist argument, but fundamentally different from it. That is a valid argument, a good argument. What do I mean by valid? A good argument—you can accept it and you can reject it, but it is not an invalid argument. The pragmatist argument is nonsense. This argument—you can debate it like any argument, but it is a relevant argument. Why? Because I am not starting from the point of departure of what I want, that the desirable determines the real. No. I claim that morality is binding as a true claim. I truly believe that morality is binding, not that I want the world to be better and for that I need people to behave morally. Rather, I have some assumption, such an intuition, that says that morality is something binding. That is what my intuition says. And now I examine backward and ask myself: what does it mean that I have such an intuition? After all, without God there is no binding morality, so apparently I also implicitly believe in God. Because without that I could not believe that morality is binding. That is already a very good argument. It is not an invalid argument. It is not pragmatism. Question.
[Speaker C] What weight does intuition have?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, and therefore I say: you can debate it. Someone can say, forget it, that intuition misleads you. No problem. But if I think the intuition is not misleading me, and I trust the intuition, that is my premise. From that premise I can certainly derive the conclusion that there is a God. And every argument, after all, is built on premises. If you don’t accept the premises, of course you won’t have to accept the conclusion. In that sense, this argument is no different from any other argument. Whoever accepts the premise is committed to the conclusion; whoever doesn’t, isn’t. That is also true of this argument, but it is no different from any other logical argument. It is the same thing. Therefore there is a difference here, and it is a subtle difference, and many times people miss it and arguments of this kind look to them like pragmatism. But no, it isn’t pragmatism. It is a philosophical argument; I call it a theological argument because of that joke, but it is really a philosophical argument. What?
[Speaker C] I didn’t understand. Does intuition have the weight of logic?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, the weight of logic?
[Speaker C] A claim like “my intuition tells me”—does that have the weight of a logical claim? What is intuition, what weight does it have at all?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s no such thing as a logical claim. I don’t know that concept, “logical claim.” I know an argument…
[Speaker C] There is no logical claim
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] no such thing. There is a true claim and an untrue claim. There are logical arguments. Arguments say: from these claims, this conclusion follows. But at the base of every argument sit premises. And the question is where you get the premises from. Not from logic; logic does not know how to produce premises. Logic knows how to derive conclusions from premises, but where do the premises come from? The premises come from intuition. Or
[Speaker C] From intuition or from observation. No, from observation no interesting premise comes from observation.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because observation always shows you—this is what we talked about earlier—observation always shows you a particular case. But that’s not the interesting premise… Let’s say I saw this phone, I let go of it, and it fell to the earth. So yes, observation shows me that this phone fell to the earth. Why is that interesting? The premise that every body with mass falls to the earth—that is not the result of observation. And that’s the interesting premise. Because that’s a law of nature, that’s… that’s an interesting claim. The claim that this happened—okay, it happened. So what if it happened? A certain event occurred. That’s not really interesting, not interesting information about the world. Interesting information about the world is when you understand a phenomenon, when you understand a general law of nature. And that is never the result of observation. So where does it come from? Various intuitions. Okay? So therefore, when on the basis of my intuition I derive premises and from them I infer conclusions, that’s a logical argument like any other logical argument. Of course, someone who doesn’t accept the premises doesn’t have to accept the conclusion. But that’s true of every logical argument. That’s why I say this is an ordinary logical argument, and you can argue with it the way you argue with any logical argument. So now I go back to Kant. Basically, Kant assumes that scientific claims are true claims. Again, not that he wants them to be true. He’s accused of pragmatism unjustly. It’s not that he wants them to be true; he genuinely, intuitively, trusts the laws of nature, the laws that science discovers. And now he asks himself retrospectively: if I trust these things, something here doesn’t fit, because these claims are synthetic a priori claims, and I don’t know of any justification for synthetic claims a priori. I don’t know of a justification for holding information about the world that doesn’t derive from observation. Okay? So he basically goes through what we might call a theological move—which is not a pragmatist move, that should be understood. It’s not a pragmatist move. A lot of people don’t understand this when they interpret Kant. In any event, what justification does he find? He wants to make the following claim. He says that actually the world we deal with when we do science is not the world as it is in itself, the world as it is out there, but rather the world as it is perceived by me. Right? When I look at phenomena in the world, the things science describes are the phenomena as I perceive them, as I see them. In other words, science does not describe the world itself; science describes the way the world appears to me, or to us. Okay? Therefore, says Kant, one must distinguish between the thing in itself, or the world in itself—the noumenon—and the thing as it appears to us, the phenomenon. Phenomenon is the appearance, the way the thing appears to us. And then he says: science deals with the phenomenon, not the noumenon. Science deals with how phenomena appear to us, not with what happens in the world itself. That’s a first distinction, and it is certainly correct. But from here, Kant says, if that’s so, then we no longer need to be so surprised that we can know things about the world without observation, a priori, by means of synthetic a priori judgments. Why? Because the tools of cognition and our conceptual system, or our scientific tools, we know from within ourselves. And if those tools shape the world that science deals with—because science does not deal with the world itself but with the world as I perceive it—then the tools, my tools of perception, actually shape, or take part in shaping, the world I deal with, the world science deals with. Science does not deal with the objective world; science deals with the world as it appears to me. But if so, then maybe I can say various things about the laws of nature without observation. Because if I know my tools, my tools of thought and cognition, then I can know various things about how phenomena will appear to me, since in the end that is also determined by the tools I use in order to describe and perceive the phenomena. Yes, think of it by way of analogy. Suppose I look at the world through red cellophane. Now even before I open my eyes, I can tell you that everything I see will be colored red. A priori. Even though when I tell you that I see something colored red, that’s a synthetic claim. Right? I see a ball colored red. ‘The ball is red’ is a synthetic claim. It’s not a claim that follows from the definition of a ball. But I know it a priori. Before I looked at the ball, I already know it’s red. Why? Because I know the tools through which I observe the ball, and I know I’m observing it through red cellophane, so I can predict without observation that the result will be that the ball is red. Even though the statement is synthetic, I know it a priori, without observation. Why? Because I basically know the tools through which I observe the world, and that familiarity allows me to say various things about the way the world, or the phenomena in the world, will appear to me. I know in advance that I won’t see things beyond ultraviolet and infrared, because that’s beyond the visible range. I don’t see anything beyond those wavelengths, above and below. Okay? So I don’t need to look at the world in order to tell you that I won’t see something beyond ultraviolet. I can tell you in advance that I don’t see it, without observing. Or that violet itself I do see—I can tell you that too, I’ll see it even without observing. Why? Because I know my cognitive system, and in my cognitive system I know that it registers violet, and what’s beyond violet it does not register. In other words, our ability to know things about the world a priori stems from the fact that we are not talking about the world; we are talking about the ‘oilem,’ as the Chazon Ish says. You know that whenever people bring proof from what the public thinks, then in the Haredi world they say: the world is not interesting; what matters is the ‘oilem.’ The ‘oilem’ means the people sitting in the study hall. Ordinary people—‘the view of laymen is the opposite of Torah wisdom.’ So the householders are not interesting, and certainly the gentiles and the secular, and the knitted-kippah crowd, not to mention them—they’re the worst, they’re certainly not interesting. In other words, what matters is not the world but the ‘oilem.’ So here too, Kant says, science does not deal with the world; it deals with the ‘oilem.’ That is, it deals with the world as the yeshiva guys perceive it, not the world as it really is. Right? Though for them, that is the world as it really is. In any event, that is the solution Kant proposed to the problem of the synthetic a priori. He calls these transcendental arguments. Transcendental arguments are basically arguments that rely on familiarity with my tools of cognition and thought, and derive various conclusions from them. And those conclusions will indeed be true regarding the things I observe. But of course they are not claims about the world; they are claims about the way the world appears to me. And therefore it’s no wonder that I can know this a priori, without observation. That, basically, is what Kant argued.
[Speaker D] Now, sorry, maybe I missed something, but according to Hume the original difficulty is still there, because since Hume didn’t distinguish between the noumenal and the phenomenal, he was also referring to that same ‘oilem’ Kant was talking about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He wasn’t aware of it, but he was referring to it, yes.
[Speaker D] Therefore, meaning, Hume’s difficulty—if I never kicked a ball, and never saw anyone kick a ball, I can, by synthetic a priori, think that the ball will fly, and according to Hume actually—
[Speaker E] That’s not true.
[Speaker D] Right, right, that’s what I wanted to say. According to Hume I have no reason to say that. Right. Meaning, I don’t really understand what Kant gains by distinguishing between the phenomena that we perceive…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hume basically argues that we really have no justification for believing in the laws of nature that we arrive at scientifically. They’re not true; we have no justification at all for thinking they’re true. It’s a convenient way for us to organize things, but these are not claims about the world.
[Speaker D] Right, but then that also applies to what Kant explains.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Because Kant argues that in any case we have no access to the world. The world science deals with is only the world as I perceive it.
[Speaker D] Fine, so why does that give me the right to think that my claims are better grounded than—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because if there were a phenomenon that didn’t fit your claim, you simply wouldn’t notice it. It may exist in the world, but you wouldn’t be able to notice it because your tools of cognition and thought are built in such a pattern that they grasp the world this way. If something else happens in the world, you won’t see it. Here I’ve already gone one step further, which I think Kant himself did not take, but that is basically what lies behind his words. And that is the problem, because once you take that step, you realize that Kant’s solution cannot be right. I mean, think of a situation where, say, Newton’s second law, that force equals mass times acceleration—okay? What really follows from Kant’s view? What follows is that actually the true law could be that force equals something times acceleration squared. But if that doesn’t fit into the pattern of F equals ma, then I won’t notice it. The things that appear to me are only things that satisfy the law F equals ma. Now there’s no logic to that. I mean, think of a situation where there is a body with a mass of one kilogram, okay? And a force of two newtons acts on it. Then the acceleration is two. Right? F equals ma, two equals one times two. Right? So the acceleration is two, okay? Then I see a force of two newtons acting, and the body accelerates at two meters per second squared. Okay, acceleration of two. Now suppose the true law in the world were F equals ma squared. There’d be some coefficient to fix the units, leave that aside for now. But F equals ma squared. Okay? Then actually the law would be that a force of two newtons acts, and the mass is one, so the acceleration is the square root of two. Right? A squared equals two, which means A is the square root of two. And that I wouldn’t see? What, I can’t see a body with a mass of one kilogram moving with an acceleration of the square root of two? 1.4 meters per second squared? Why not? If a force of the square root of two acts on it and it has a mass of one kilogram, it will move with an acceleration of the square root of two, and I’ll see that. So if a force of two newtons acts on it and it moves with an acceleration of the square root of two, suddenly I won’t see it? What, my eyes will close? What’s going to happen? Why wouldn’t I see it? If I can see a body of one kilogram moving with a certain acceleration, then I can see it. What difference does it make what force is acting on it? Does the force acting on the body somehow blind me? Prevent me from seeing? There’s no logic in that. His explanation is no better—it’s no better than the question. It’s no clearer than the question it came to explain. You can always say there are demons that don’t let us see anything that doesn’t fit our conceptions. That’s also a solution. That’s basically what Kant is proposing. Yes? No, did someone want to ask?
[Speaker F] Rabbi, I think this is what was asked earlier: even if you’re only looking for what is revealed to your eyes and not the world itself, still even in your inner world, why are you making an induction? How does this answer Hume’s question? Even in your world, fine, you’re not talking about a real external world, but you saw three cases and from that you derive a law of nature. Who says so?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] His claim is that if I saw three cases, then apparently that’s how my vision is built. And if that’s how my vision is built, I won’t see anything else.
[Speaker F] But Hume asks him: why is it… why is it built that way? Fine, so stop seeing it that way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but if you go back and ask Hume’s question, then I agree.
[Speaker F] No, but how does this answer Hume’s question—that’s what the earlier questioner asked.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He answers Hume’s question by basically saying: the fact that you saw it three times is not because in the world it really always happens that way, but because, as it were, your mode of vision causes you to see things that way. And if so, then going forward you’ll also see the same thing. Who says? Because of your mode of vision.
[Speaker F] No, but you saw before—who says that’s how it will continue?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because that’s how you’re built.
[Speaker F] Maybe even your mode of vision changes over time?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because that’s how you’re built.
[Speaker F] He’s distinguishing between the subject and the object.
[Speaker D] Who—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who said that the way you’re built changes from day to day? Fine, so on that point I really don’t know how he could answer.
[Speaker D] He’s a Brisker, right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s a Brisker. I don’t accept his claim anyway, so I don’t need to get that far. I don’t think he answers the question even if I grant it.
[Speaker D] What the Rabbi is saying is not that he distinguishes… it’s similar to object and subject, no? He’s looking—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Basically, the laws of nature are a law in the subject. Oi-lem, what I said, yes. So in short, this is a little important to me—not the claim itself but the mode of thinking. Why?
[Speaker F] Rabbi, but what one could say—I think maybe this is where I didn’t understand Hume. I didn’t understand Hume the way the Rabbi explained. The fact that this is the accepted reading, I don’t think I understood him that way. I think all Hume wanted to say in his whole doctrine is that we are built on feeling. It’s all just our feeling, and rationality won’t help us here. Neither rationality nor anything else. Whereas—wait, one second, Rabbi—and whereas Kant, who was a rationalist, and for whom feeling was a problem and not a solution, made all these apologetic moves to create some kind of discourse of rationality that the Rabbi has really dismantled.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t understand the claim. You’re repeating what I said in other words. You’re saying what I’m saying.
[Speaker F] But it’s not because he was an empiricist that he said this. All in all he said: I get on airplanes and I act entirely according to all the Newtonian laws and everything—but because I feel that way. Everything is feeling, including morality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is what the justification for that is, and in his view there is no justification.
[Speaker F] But he has feeling, he’s a human being, and he acts according to feeling like all of us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s no philosophical justification for it. The fact that you have feeling—we all agree that we have such feelings. So what?
[Speaker F] It could be that he said philosophy doesn’t interest me, whereas Kant, being a philosopher, was bothered by saying what Hume said.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hume was a philosopher, and philosophy interested him very much; he invested many books in it. And I think he came to refute philosophy and not… no, he didn’t refute philosophy. He really remained with a question to which he had no answer. Fine, you say it’s feeling—it remains a question.
[Speaker F] I read him in the original. My understanding is that he’s aiming at feeling.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No problem, but you’re repeating the same thing I said, just in other words. Right, he relies on feeling, and that has no justification. Okay, so that is exactly Hume’s question. Calling it feeling doesn’t help. I agree—so what? But there is no justification for this thing.
[Speaker F] What do you mean? Again, Rabbi, when he separates the is from the ought, he says that we do the ought according to what we feel, not because we have rational reasons. So the Rabbi will say: why do you do that? Why don’t you murder? You have no explanation? So murder. Hume tells you: no, I feel that it’s forbidden. And the Rabbi calls that intuition—the same thing. Kant tells you that Hume is right about all the—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re going back to the same point. I’ll return to it; we’ll get there in a moment. The claim, ultimately, is that the only solution proposed to these problems of Hume, to the foundational problems of epistemology—Kant’s solution—doesn’t hold water. So basically, on the philosophical level, we are left high and dry. Trust in science—we all trust science. Shmuel will call it feeling; I call it intuition. We all trust science, I think most of us do. But as a philosopher, you look for what the justification is. And therefore the problem is a problem on the philosophical level: what could the justification for this be? Now, when we look at this in light of how I presented the problem earlier—it wasn’t by chance that I went through all that in order to present the problem. Because I wanted to explain what this problem of the synthetic a priori is. Basically, this problem asks: how, why do I assume there is a correlation between what I think and what happens in the world? Right? That’s really the question. The fact that I think something operates in a certain way—why should I assume that this is indeed what will happen in the world? The fact that I think so, fine, very nice, because that’s how I’m built. But what does that have to do with what happens in the world? The world owes me nothing. That’s really the question. Now I say: in my opinion, after summing up all these approaches and seeing that none of them really succeeds in answering the question, I think the only way I can justify to myself this trust in generalizations and scientific thinking, in scientific laws, is if I really understand that intuition is not a thinking tool. Contrary to what both Kant and Hume assumed—they both assumed that intuition is a thinking tool. And when my thinking says something, there is no justification for applying that to the world. Because the way I am built determines how I think, but it has nothing to do with how the world is built. And therefore what I think should not serve as a measure of what happens in the world. And that is why they got entangled in all these problems. But if I say no—intuition is not a thinking tool, it is a cognitive tool. A sixth sense. We have five senses that we know how to list; we have another sense. That sense is called intuition. And my claim is that intuition is an ability to observe the world, but to observe it with the eyes of the intellect. Not to observe with the eyes, not with the senses. It’s not one of the five senses. But intuition is not thought, not something that happens inside me. It is some kind of interaction between me and the world. That interaction is carried out through means located in the intellect, not in the senses. But the intellect has some ability to grasp things in the world. That is the assumption I am proposing here. Okay? And that ability, that faculty, is called intuition. Now, unlike feeling—yes, this is by way of that earlier argument—I want to distinguish between intuition and feeling. The example I always bring in this context is this: someone is working on a difficult mathematical problem. He grinds away at mathematics for a month, two months, three months, and he doesn’t get the answer. A friend of his comes along, some talented mathematical genius, looks at the page, sees what he’s dealing with, and tells him: it’s eight, the answer is eight. The fellow looks, plugs eight into the equation—right, that’s the solution. He asks his friend in amazement: tell me, how did you come up with that? I’ve been working on this for a year. I can’t get there. ‘I had a feeling,’ his friend says. ‘I had a feeling it was eight.’ Now you understand that when he says here, ‘I had a feeling,’ he doesn’t mean feeling in the sense of emotion. Feeling in the sense of love, hate, fear, and the like. What’s the difference? If I say I love someone and someone else says he doesn’t love him, we don’t have a dispute, right? I love him and he doesn’t love him. Matter of chemistry. Right? That is, my chemistry is built one way, your chemistry is built another way. It’s not a dispute. You’re telling me what you feel and I’m telling you what I feel. There’s nothing to argue about regarding feelings: my feeling is mine, your feeling is yours. If I’m afraid of dogs and you’re not afraid, there need not be any correspondence between what you feel inside and what I feel inside. Okay?
[Speaker B] That’s an assumption the Rabbi holds; it’s not necessary.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not necessary; it’s true.
[Speaker B] Meaning, I feel compassion for the children of Gaza, so I claim everyone ought to feel it. I’m not saying ‘I feel it,’ and the fact that the Rabbi says something else—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Heaven forbid, or—
[Speaker B] —or someone else, that’s legitimate.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re not claiming that.
[Speaker B] You’re not claiming that with the eyes of the intellect and moral intuition, but the truth is that I feel it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re not claiming that.
[Speaker B] I am claiming that. No. I’m claiming that only I feel it, and that’s a problem.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let me tell you what you are claiming. What you’re claiming is not that I have to feel compassion for the children of Gaza, but that I have to make sure this doesn’t happen to them.
[Speaker B] No, God forbid.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The feeling inside me is a feeling that stems from how I’m built. The moral question is not connected to the question of what I feel; it’s connected to the question of what I do. It’s forbidden to do this. You’re not claiming that one must feel this way or feel otherwise.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, I’ll demonstrate for the Rabbi, it’s important. Two weeks ago I spoke with a rabbi from an important and leading hesder yeshiva in the country, who recently served for three months in that division area there in Gaza, and I understood from him that there were catastrophic horrors there. I told him—my closing sentence was: Rabbi, I have no problem with what was done there. I’m not a military commander, and it could be that there was no choice but to do everything down to the last detail. But if I knew it was done out of compassion—that people said, ‘we checked, we did what we had to do, our hearts ache but we have no choice’—I’d have no complaints; I’m not a military expert. But the truth is that we don’t care. As far as we’re concerned, everyone is happy that it’s very good, and ‘when the wicked perish there is rejoicing,’ and ‘blot out the memory of Amalek.’ That’s what bothers me. Certainly not the rational issue, but the emotional issue is what matters.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I’ll correct that again. I claim that you don’t understand yourself correctly. I’ll correct it again. What bothers you is that I am supposed to understand that something problematic is happening here. Feel—wait, wait, no, no, no. I’m being precise on purpose. I’m now saying, okay, let’s go with a weaker claim than what I said before. It’s the same claim, but a weaker formulation than before. Even now you’re still not talking about the question of what feeling nests inside me; rather you’re talking about the question of whether I understand that there is something problematic here.
[Speaker B] There’s nothing to understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing to understand.
[Speaker B] No, if I think it is desirable that these Amalekites die, then there’s nothing to understand here. No, and you claim that I think incorrectly—not that I feel incorrectly, but that I think incorrectly. No, I have no rational claim here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’ll tell me a premise—
[Speaker B] You have a rational claim.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You think one should feel this.
[Speaker B] You’re mixing levels. Not true. The Rabbi will tell me: it is written ‘blot out the memory of Amalek,’ they are Amalekites, the conclusion, the simple inference, is that they should be destroyed. Simple and elegant. But on that I do not disagree; with those claims I do not disagree.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I also agree that you don’t disagree; I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the question of whether you understand that there is something problematic here and then shoot an Amalekite in the head, or whether you shoot an Amalekite in the head without understanding that. You’re presenting something else here. You’re claiming: no, it’s a question of what feeling dwells within me. Now suppose I’m emotionally blocked, okay? That’s just how I’m built, I was born that way. I was born that way—what do you mean it’s a problem? But it’s not a moral problem; that’s how I’m built. What do you want?
[Speaker B] A person who, God forbid, is a psychopath—he has no feeling, no compassion—he simply needs treatment, he’s a psychopath, he’s damaged.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. And you have no claim against him, nor could you.
[Speaker B] I have no claim against him, right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you do have a claim against them. We’re not psychopaths. The claim against them is not on the level of feeling; the claim against them is on the level of understanding. The understanding that something problematic is happening here. Whether this—
[Speaker B] —finds expression in feeling or—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —doesn’t find expression in feeling, that’s really not important.
[Speaker B] Suppose the Rabbi took control of an autistic person—God forbid, I got up in the morning and was infected with the… not autistic, sorry, psychopathic. A psychopathy virus. I don’t feel anything. Now I go to Gaza, see all these things, they tell me: listen, they endanger us, the little ones will grow up to be murderers—excellent, they should all be destroyed, every last one of them. Do I have anything to say, any rational claim? No. Exactly. That’s what I’m telling you, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So it’s only feeling. You have no claim at all against someone who doesn’t feel.
[Speaker B] I do—now that the feeling came back, I still claim that the Rabbi should too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You have no claim at all against someone who doesn’t feel; you’re simply confused. What you’re claiming, what you’re claiming, is that he should understand that something problematic is happening here.
[Speaker B] There’s nothing to understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing to understand.
[Speaker B] No, Rabbi, with the premises—the premises are simple—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They are Amalekites; they should be destroyed. No, the premises are not simple. You’re simply confusing levels, that’s all. Let’s try to understand ourselves; we probably won’t settle this here. Fine, so in short, what I want to say is this: intuition and feeling are not the same thing. When a person comes and says, ‘I felt that the solution was eight,’ what is he really saying? He’s not saying, ‘I had a feeling that the solution was eight.’ Because if it were a feeling, then someone else has a feeling that the solution is nine. Do they have no dispute? Of course they have a dispute. The one who said eight is right, and the one who said nine is wrong. I checked, I substituted eight and it came out correct; nine is not correct. Which means that what he called ‘I had a feeling’—what he really meant was: I had an intuition. And intuition is a tool for understanding what the truth is, unlike feeling, which is merely a report of what I feel inside. That has nothing to do with truth and falsehood. When you make a claim that is measured in terms of true and false, you are talking about intuition and not about feeling. Even though very often we use the phrase ‘I have a feeling,’ or ‘that’s how I feel.’ You can use whatever term you want, but in my eyes that’s not a good usage because it’s confusing. I think it’s important to distinguish between a state of feeling and a state of intuition. What they have in common is that I say the answer without having done the calculation. And therefore, many times instead of ‘intuition’ I say, ‘I had a feeling,’ because feeling is something that doesn’t come from calculation. But that’s a mistake. It’s not feeling; it’s intuition. Intuition is thinking that doesn’t derive—yes, Kahneman’s System 1. That is to say, it is a factual conclusion, a factual claim about the world, that doesn’t derive from calculation or explicit reasoning. Intuition directly grasps that this is the truth. So it is similar to feeling in the sense that it doesn’t derive from consideration or an argument, but it is very different from feeling in the sense that the product is a claim about the world. And someone who doesn’t agree with it is wrong. We have a dispute. Whereas in the case of feeling, if I feel differently from you, we have no dispute; you feel that way, I feel differently. Rabbi. Yes.
[Speaker E] I think I pretty much agree with what the Rabbi is saying. In the example the Rabbi gave about mathematics, the Rabbi is really saying that the one who comes and gives the number eight is an expert in mathematics, and therefore his intuition is probably correct.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not necessarily. Not every expert can do that. It has to be a person with a high intuitive capacity. It could be.
[Speaker E] No, but if he has no clue in mathematics—some first-grade kid says, ‘I have an intuition that it’s eight,’ and he was right—what weight do we give to people’s intuitions?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One hundred percent weight. Meaning, if that kid wasn’t accidentally right one time, but I see consistently that he has that kind of intuition, then apparently he has that kind of intuition. It’s not connected to expertise. It’s true that expertise develops intuition—very likely—but in principle it’s not connected to expertise. A person could have intuition even without being an expert.
[Speaker E] But I would simply give it less weight, less importance.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if you check and see that it works, then no, I wouldn’t give it less importance. If you see that it’s significant, that it really works.
[Speaker E] No, but why I’m thinking about this is because I think there are also many—I don’t know whether to call them rabbis or not—but people who have intuition about things that are beyond nature or things like that. What weight do we give that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what’s the problem? Check whether it’s true. The number eight—you check that it’s true. What, anyone can say he has intuition about all kinds of things—what does that help? It helps nothing. Here I’m talking about intuition that you can test. He tells you it’s eight—put it into the equation, see that it really is eight. Okay? So in short, what I want to say is that the only solution I think one can offer to this problem of Hume and Kant is that intuition is a cognitive tool and not a thinking tool. Therefore, if I have a certain intuition that something is true, that means I am in some sense seeing it—not with my eyes, but with the eyes of the intellect. Intuition is an interaction with the world. It is not something that happens inside the head or inside the mind; it is a kind of interaction with the world. And therefore the fact that I infer this way, even though it is ostensibly not empirical through the senses—I don’t have sensory observations supporting this problem—but intuition is… if intuition were a thinking process, as many people understand it, then indeed why assume that what happens inside me reflects what happens in the world? But if I say intuition is a kind of sense, just as you assume that the eyes reflect what happens in the world, intuition also reflects what happens in the world. And if I see things that happened three times, and my intuition tells me this is not coincidence, apparently there is a general law here, then that means not that I made a generalization from those cases to the general law, but that I see that there is a general law here. The process of generalization is not a thinking process. Usually people understand it this way: my observations give me the sample, and then comes the generalization—which is a thinking process—and produces the… I say no. Through the particular cases I observed, I see that behind them sits a general law. I see it with the eyes of the intellect, not with my physical eyes. But my claim is that this is basically a kind of sense. Now of course one can reject this, one can say this itself is a delusion. Who says this is a justification? I say yes, but by the same token one can also say that the eyes don’t reflect reality and that too is a delusion. Why do empiricists accept that sensory observation is indeed valid? The whole problem is generalizations or causality or things like that. I claim that intuition is one of the senses. Just as we have the five regular physical senses we know, we also have this sense. And this sense knows that this is how things happen in the world because it sees it in the world, not because that’s how I’m used to thinking. So the whole question of the fit between how I think and what happens in the world falls away, because there is no fit here—I simply see, just as I don’t ask about my sight and hearing.
[Speaker E] No, but Rabbi, with the five regular senses, let’s call them that, the result I get is much more certain than intuition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s something else. So what? In distant cases, when I see something from very far away, then the certainty of what I see is also not high, right? But it’s still seeing and not thinking. I didn’t say intuition has to be as certain as the senses. There are different levels of intuition, and we have different levels of certainty regarding different intuitions, obviously. But I do claim that intuition is an admissible tool. That is, it is a tool one can use. Not to be certain—in nothing am I certain; even in what I see I’m not certain. But it’s an admissible tool. Contrary to what the empiricists claim, that intuition is a delusion and there is no reason to trust it, I say: trust it. Not without limit—apply criticism, test it—but yes, one can trust it. It is a tool like any other tool we have. That is basically the claim.
[Speaker E] But one that basically requires empirical testing?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everything requires it. Vision does too, everything does.
[Speaker D] But Rabbi, you give intuition so much weight that you call it a cognitive sense, but after all we see that people’s intuitions are very, very different, unlike sight or hearing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, I don’t think you’re right. A great many intuitions are shared by all people or by most people. There are certain things about which there is disagreement, true. So if you bring evidence from the question whether there is agreement or no agreement, then first of all on many intuitions there is agreement. Now what happens with intuitions about which there is no agreement? Fine, then I’ll need to weigh it again, maybe I’ll cast greater doubt on it. And I said that with different intuitions I have different levels of confidence. It’s not that with all intuitions I have the same level of confidence. And still I’ll try to test, and in the end I’ll arrive at my own conclusions with a warning note on the side—that I could always be mistaken. Fine, I didn’t say anything absolute here, that every intuition is certainly true or even that every intuition has the same level of confidence or certainty. No. I’m only claiming that in principle this sense called intuition is admissible just like the sense of sight, just like the sense of hearing. Sometimes it’s murkier, okay, so then indeed I don’t—
[Speaker E] But it can also bias us. What? It can also bias us. I think it can bias.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everything can bias us; sight can bias us too. There is a mirage, right? And still we use sight where we understand that it reflects the truth, and still it may be that we’re mistaken even where we understand that it reflects the truth. Could be. But I say: once you ask a question about generalizations, you, as an empiricist, are basically saying: look, the senses I accept—but what about generalizations? So I say: if you accept the senses, I don’t see why you wouldn’t accept generalizations; a generalization is also a kind of sense. That’s my claim. There is no essential difference between this and that. If you are a skeptic and not an empiricist, but you say: no, neither the senses nor generalizations nor anything else—everything remains in doubt—then fine, I have nothing to say to skepticism.
[Speaker D] So you’re saying, you’re saying that one actually sees causality?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. When I look and see someone kick a ball and the ball flies, if you ask yourselves, all of you will agree with me: we see that the ball flies because of the kick. It doesn’t undergo any additional cognitive process. It’s obvious to us that it flies because of the kick. Only the formalist empiricist will say: no, no, that’s obvious to you because you got used to it, it’s obvious to you because you have delusions, I know, all kinds of things like that. No, I claim that it’s obvious to me because I see it, just as what I see is obvious to me. It’s a sense. Now again, maybe yes and maybe no, but if Kant trusts the general laws, the laws of nature, this is the only explanation there is. You can reject this explanation, but then you have to be a total skeptic. Therefore those are the two options: either be a total skeptic and accept nothing—nothing at all—or accept the fact that intuition is a kind of sense and one can trust it. Again, with limited warranty, but one can trust it and go with it. The position of empiricism, in my opinion, is not logical, because empiricism trusts the senses but does not trust laws.
[Speaker C] Sorry for my ignorance, I couldn’t understand—why can’t one prove Hume wrong from reality itself, from what we see? That someone who flies, insofar as he relied on what had been true until today—fact is, he was right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hume himself already comments on that. Then you’re making an induction about inductions. You can’t base your trust in the process of induction on induction, because it worked until now. If it worked until now, then apparently it will also work going forward. That’s the very principle.
[Speaker C] But we see that reality proves that someone who relies—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —on what happened yesterday is right. In reality, you saw in the past that in reality it worked, and you want to say that it will continue to work going forward. That is induction. You can’t use induction to ground induction.
[Speaker D] That’s true, but it’s much more far-fetched and forced to say that it will change, since for generations and generations that’s how it has worked.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can say that. So you accept induction only where it is more plausible. Okay, but Hume in principle did not accept induction because it is a thinking process and not an observational process. Now what you are proposing is also a thinking process, only in your view this line of thought is stronger than other lines of thought. He was not willing in principle to accept that thought is a tool for knowing the world; only observation is a tool for knowing the world.
[Speaker C] But he also concedes probability. Again? He also concedes that high probability does—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is—he—
[Speaker C] He simply denies certainty.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It has nothing to do with probability. My next sentence has nothing to do with probability in any way. But I won’t have time to get to that today—next time.
[Speaker C] Meaning, he also holds that there is not even a probability that it will continue to be so?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Completely probabilistic. Good. Any more questions?
[Speaker E] Yes, Rabbi. In my profession it’s investments, the capital market, and this very much reminds me of… there was some study by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—they got, I think, a Nobel Prize for it—where they specifically showed that when you act in investments out of emotion or intuition, it actually works against you, almost always against you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be. There are certain fields in which our intuitions are misleading and weak, so it’s worth checking our intuitions.
[Speaker E] Fine. Meaning they say that it creates—in English it’s “biased,” what do you call that in Hebrew? A bias. Biases. Exactly. And you need to try as much as possible to detach from that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. It’s not exactly news that intuitions mislead human beings. You need to cross-check intuitions. But someone who wants to operate without intuitions won’t get anywhere. What they’re proposing is also intuition. What Kahneman and Tversky propose is also intuition. There’s no activity without intuition.
[Speaker E] No, they tested it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That doesn’t make it not intuition. Let them test until tomorrow. What they’re proposing is also intuition. Just intuition with controls. Intuition with controls is perfectly fine. Using intuition in a controlled way. There is no field in the universe where you can function without intuition. There’s no such thing. None. Every decision, every economic law, everything you arrive at is ultimately based on intuitions. I don’t know.
[Speaker E] It may be based on them, but it could be that those intuitions work against us—they don’t help us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: there are fields where intuitions mislead us, obviously. And there may be fields that are more prone to that, that’s also possible. So you need to put controls in place. But there’s no alternative—acting without intuitions is an illusion. There’s no such thing. We always operate with intuitions. The only question is which intuitions to go with.
[Speaker E] So even if I build, say, a robot that invests for me, and it’s free of emotion and intuition…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It won’t be free of emotion and intuition; it’ll have your intuitions.
[Speaker E] Because I built it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, I ask myself—the disagreement between me and the Rabbi about emotion and intuition, whether it’s the same thing or not, comes out both in morality and in science; they’re really parallel. There’s hardly a hair’s breadth here; it’s almost a semantic issue. After all, both of them… it isn’t rational in an absolute sense, it can’t be proven. On the other hand, it interacts with reality, and I also argue that emotions, some of them… I’ve said many times already that what you call emotion is what I call intuition. No, but I’m still trying to understand why it comes out as a disagreement. Because I think Kant’s concern, maybe also the Rabbi’s, is to give emotion that kind of place. Because if we’re already saying that basically… there’s no concern at all, no.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t come from concerns. I’m saying…
[Speaker B] But I think there’s a major concern here. Why? Because if you go and give emotion such a place, then when someone else feels something different about reality, then we’re already entering a somewhat postmodernist view of different perspectives on the same reality, and that’s difficult.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not making consequentialist claims, again,
[Speaker B] That’s pragmatism. So I challenge that a bit. I’m not talking about the Rabbi, I’m talking about Kant. I do think he didn’t want emotion to be there—after all, he was against compassion. He explicitly wrote that compassion is a flawed emotion, not a positive one. I disagree.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He said
[Speaker B] that compassion
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] should not lead us.
[Speaker B] I know the Rabbi’s position, but when I read it, he didn’t see it as an addition to the moral act, and also the Rabbi, when he gave the example from yesterday morning—when a person says, “I feel great that I hurt you, good that I hit you and shamed you in public, humiliated you, and I have no emotional problem with it at all. I just understood, I saw in the Shulchan Arukh, I learned the right chapter, the right clause, and saw that it’s wrong.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not because of the Shulchan Arukh—because I understand intellectually, not Shulchan Arukh.
[Speaker B] Right, the Rabbi says that’s much better than someone else who says, “I can’t sleep at night anymore because of what I did to you.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying.
[Speaker B] I maintain that that wasn’t the example the Rabbi gave.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What I’m saying, what I’m saying is that someone driven by emotion is worse than someone driven by his recognition, by his understanding. But someone who’s driven by his understanding and also has emotion—the emotion is not invalid. There’s nothing bad about it; it’s only good. But the emotion isn’t supposed to run the show.
[Speaker B] Again, two people need to invest effort—it’s not easy to go and ask forgiveness after some, I don’t know, to travel to the end of the world and ask forgiveness for something we did. One is driven by two—he has two engines on the plane; he’s not single-engine. He has one significant engine of emotion, of regret and shame and the confession he wants to make, and he also has the rational engine, that he read in some clause, as the Rabbi says. The plane flies easily, really at the speed of light. The other, by contrast, makes do with some single-engine plane, because only rational recognition. So obviously in the Rabbi’s eyes he is less good, and the Rabbi also said that explicitly. I think that’s the root of our problem. I think the result of the illusion of rationality that we’ve been following has brought us to the moral disaster we’re in right now vis-à-vis Gaza. That’s the root of the matter. If we understood that emotion is the significant thing and needs to be examined responsibly, all the arguments I have and all my debates with religious people are exactly around this.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If we’re already getting into current events, what brought us to this disaster is your emotionalism. If people were rational, this disaster wouldn’t have happened. Why?
[Speaker B] Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When there wasn’t emotion—when people didn’t have compassion on the cruel—and they would have spared many lives on both sides.
[Speaker B] Yes, twenty thousand children, ninety thousand children.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Twenty thousand children too.
[Speaker B] Who didn’t choose to be born there. They were just born there by chance. If they had been born in Jerusalem they’d be like me and like the Rabbi’s grandchildren. A little compassion? No. What does that have to do with compassion? I’m not talking about compassion at all. Compassion is the incomprehensible human tragedy that the whole world stands shocked by—how the Jewish people are going through this. The whole world is stupid, so what should I do? What can I do that the whole world is stupid? Fine, okay. I didn’t say I base my argument on the world, but I completely identify with the world when we have lost all
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] compassion.
[Speaker D] And I don’t.
[Speaker B] Fine, we’re arguing. Right, what, they didn’t choose to be born there, everything you say is true,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everything you’re saying is true, that they didn’t choose to be born there.
[Speaker D] What’s the solution according to Shmuel?
[Speaker B] The solution according to Shmuel is first of all to understand that we too carry wrongs on our conscience—not only they committed wrongs, we did too—and we have no way to control ten million Palestinians. In another ten years they’ll be ten million. How long will the world allow this? How long will the world allow this kind of apartheid? You went back to the world again even though you say you don’t rely on the world. I moved a little toward the world because you also need to think a little—I’m saying I’m going a bit to the Rabbi’s side, a little rationality—where are we heading? But we’re full of hatred and a desire for revenge, and emotion also activates the supposedly rational people, and so they rejoice in the suffering of Gazan children.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my view that’s invalid because of its very flaw. What leads you is emotion, and therefore you’re willing…
[Speaker B] I agree, I agree, no—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I do it openly,
[Speaker B] I completely think I’m mistaken. You do it openly—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and arrive at mistakes openly because of emotion.
[Speaker B] But I examine
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] myself, but the others don’t examine themselves because they
[Speaker B] see and make the calculation. They examine themselves—as opposed to you, who doesn’t examine yourself because you’re driven by emotion—and they examine their emotions and conclude that they don’t let emotions run them. How many of them felt one minute of compassion for the children of Gaza in the last two weeks? No one, no one, no one, except for those few rare leftists. Everyone else is happy at their misfortune. I’m talking to the most left-wing people I know among family members and friends; even they say, “The truth is I don’t care about them, let them die.” Why? Because I want revenge on them. If Rabbi Sherlo appears on Zoom and says that since October 7 he feels revenge, and he’s not proud of it but he feels it—then if among such cedars a flame has fallen, what shall the hyssops of the wall say?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One hundred percent, I also
[Speaker B] feel that way, so what does that have to do with anything? Fine, the Rabbi told me that openly, we’re not arguing, I know…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but revenge does not run me—what does that have to do with anything? Fine, neither the emotion of revenge nor the emotion of compassion. I’m not willing for that to run me, and not for that to run me. I have emotions like everyone else; we’re human beings. The difference between us is that I’m not willing to let emotions run me. Neither the emotion of revenge nor the emotion of compassion. What runs me is what is right to do, strategically and tactically as well. I promise the Rabbi—
[Speaker B] that if the virus of compassion—which I die to fantasize about just once—were to attack all the Jewish people and infect them in a way that couldn’t be vaccinated against, we’d all be in the sea. No, I promise the Rabbi that all Jewish intelligence would find the technique, the way it did in Iran and with Hezbollah; it would find the smart way without killing twenty thousand children.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’d all be in the sea—provided we didn’t drown in the sea—that’s what Jewish intelligence would be able to do.
[Speaker B] No, I think it would… I think the gap in the middle… how did we get to Iran, to the sharpest point of the sharp point, without hurting anything, and here we’re fighting for two years with no creativity at all, really just smashing…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Enough, please. You’re recycling foolish arguments here that I can’t even… it’s degrading to address them. Do me a favor.
[Speaker B] I’m speaking out of emotion—it really hurts me, I’ll tell the Rabbi the truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand that it hurts.
[Speaker B] This is the reality today of being
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] an Israeli Jew.
[Speaker B] An Israeli Jew. I’m ashamed, it’s simply shameful.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand that it hurts, and I understand that there is emotion inside you, and still I think it’s not right to let emotion run you, that’s all.
[Speaker B] That may be the root of the disagreement between us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Good, I…
[Speaker B] I think there isn’t even a hair’s breadth between us, honestly, at the deepest depth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think so too. In my opinion, in my opinion, you’re mixing up emotion and intuition. Sometimes you turn it into an ideology, but that confusion shows its effects.
[Speaker B] Not ideology—after all, when the Rabbi says intuition, he isn’t criticizing the world of emotion. We know what rationality is—it’s mathematics. I defined, I defined well the difference between intuition and emotion. Yes, you defined it, but I’m saying nobody was there in our brain, in the psyche, nobody saw the field and the area of this. So all I’m saying is…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But we know how we operate.
[Speaker B] Yes, but I’m saying that from my point of view the whole domain that is not rational is emotion. The Rabbi divides that area into two.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s completely rational. There is no non-rational domain. There is no such domain. There are non-rational people.
[Speaker C] Just a small question: I wanted to ask whether Hume knows that he was mistaken with respect to the past. Meaning, with respect to the future period from his point onward, which is our past—the period between Hume’s time and the period that is our past. Meaning, from his time until us—does he know that he was mistaken? Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he wasn’t mistaken. He learned that it kept working for a few more years onward, and he would still say: yes, but regarding what comes next, we have no basis for assuming that.
[Speaker C] No, I’m not talking about what he would say about the future, but whether he knows that he was mistaken with respect to that, because throughout that whole period—which was his future and is our past—it was proven that he was mistaken.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not a mistake. It happened—so what if it happened? Fine. But that doesn’t mean there is a general law.
[Speaker C] It was proven that those who acted that way were right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, fine.
[Speaker C] Whoever relied on it…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In faith like that. He also acts that way; he just says that he acts that way because that’s how we…
[Speaker C] So he also didn’t believe what he was saying? But what difference does it make—he was wrong, he was wrong because it was proven that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he wasn’t wrong, because once again you’re drawing conclusions about the future.
[Speaker C] No, I’m not talking about the future, I’m talking only about the past.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But about the past he didn’t say that it wouldn’t happen.
[Speaker C] No, I’m talking about the future from his perspective, which is our past.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand. About his future he didn’t say that it wouldn’t happen. He said he doesn’t know whether it will happen or not. It may, it may not. You have no basis for assuming that it will.
[Speaker C] But those who disagreed with him, those who disagreed with him said it would continue to be so, and they were right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But he didn’t say it wouldn’t continue. He said it could… you know, there’s a letter by Rabbi Shach, the second letter in his book. He talks about Operation Entebbe. I spoke about it once. He talks about Operation Entebbe. Before they carried out Operation Entebbe, he argued that it was forbidden to do it, because there was almost no chance of success and soldiers would be hurt. In his view it was not right to go on such an operation. After the operation succeeded, they came back to him and said, “Well, Rabbi, you see? It succeeded.” He said, “I didn’t say it wouldn’t succeed. I said the chance that it would succeed was very small. But even a small chance can materialize, okay? So what?”
[Speaker D] And since when is he an expert in these things?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is what you do with the data you have in hand. In light of the data you have in hand, what decision is the right one to make? So what if something succeeded de facto? What
[Speaker D] expertise did Rabbi Shach have to express an opinion?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not a question of expertise. I think most experts also agreed on the facts. The question whether to go ahead with the operation anyway or not—that’s largely a value question, not a factual question. The question is whether you’re willing to take a significant risk to soldiers for a fairly small chance of success or not. It’s not a simple question, and he had his own position. It doesn’t matter right now, that’s not the point. His disagreement was not about facts; his disagreement was a value disagreement.
[Speaker D] Because it reminds me a bit of the article the Rabbi wrote about the outrageous things said by the yeshiva heads, and this thing by Tuvia and all that, a little bit.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, not the same thing. On the contrary, there he said what he said for the sake of the soldiers. Meaning, he said: why endanger soldiers who may be hurt when you don’t have much chance of success? Now, it doesn’t matter at the moment whether he was right or not on the factual level; the disagreement wasn’t on the factual level. Meaning, his claim was: if the facts are such, it is not right to endanger the soldiers for a small chance of success. And that’s a value question. Fine. I’m only saying that on the statistical level it’s an interesting claim. The question is whether the fact that it later succeeded means he wasn’t right. He claimed that it didn’t. Given the data before us, the correct decision was that one. True, a small chance sometimes succeeds—so what? Does that mean—let’s say there’s a ninety-five… let’s say it came out for me three or four times in a row that I rolled sixes with dice. I rolled a die, and four times in a row I got a six. Does that mean that the next time I’ll also get a six with a fair die? No. So what if it came out four times? Does that prove anything? It proves nothing. The die isn’t fair; next time it won’t come out six. I still say it won’t come out six.
[Speaker D] But I have an intuition that it will come out six.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I’m saying: it could be that you doubt that the die is fair. You say it could be that the die isn’t fair. But let’s say I measured everything, I know—the die is fair, this is a coincidence. By chance it came out four sixes. I checked the die; it’s completely fair. Then obviously on the next bet I’m not betting on six.
[Speaker B] If it happened a million times, that’s hard.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What?
[Speaker B] If it happened a million times that it was six, that’s hard.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After a million times, then I’d start doubting my tests. It could be that the tests that showed the die is fair were wrong, because it’s not reasonable that it’s fair.
[Speaker B] I checked and it came out fair.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but the tests of the rolls show that it isn’t. So something in your test may be flawed. That’s what I think. Okay, Sabbath peace.
[Speaker D] Thank you very much, Sabbath peace.