The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 40
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
- Shlomo Maimon: Figure, Writings, and Influence
- The Eddington Joke and Remarks on the Historiography of “Returning to Religion”
- Hume, Kant, and the Synthetic A Priori as the Basis of Science
- Kant: The Fit Between Consciousness and the World, and the Perception of Phenomena
- Leibniz, the Identity of Indiscernibles, and Kant on Substance and Properties
- Shlomo Maimon Against Kant: The Thing-in-Itself Within Consciousness and a Network of Knowledge
- The Unity of God, Judgment, and Inference: An Essay Toward the New Logic and the Supreme Logical Unity
- Non-Verbal Thought, the Rashba, and Tosafot on Whether Mental Reflection Counts as Speech
- Infinite Intellect, Matter and Form, and the Unity of the Intellect, the Intellecting Subject, and the Intelligible Object
Summary
General Overview
This passage presents a lecture that tries to understand what lies behind certain sections in “the Nazir” through familiarity with Shlomo Maimon and the Kantian/post-Kantian background. The speaker describes Maimon’s biography and influence, presents Hume’s basic problem regarding induction and causality and Kant’s solution through “synthetic a priori judgments” and the noumena/phenomena distinction, and then brings Maimon’s critique, which goes back to Leibniz and leads to an idealist picture in which even the “thing in itself” is within consciousness. From there he interprets “the unity of God, judgment, and inference” as a “supreme logical unity” and connects this to the unity of the intellect, the intellecting subject, and the intelligible object, and to religious language about the infinite, while adding methodological remarks about constructive philosophy and about the relationship between non-verbal thought and language.
Shlomo Maimon: Figure, Writings, and Influence
Shlomo Maimon is presented as a very gifted Jew who grew up as a prodigy, married at age fourteen, “filled his belly with the Talmud and halakhic decisors,” and afterward “learned and then departed,” arrived in Berlin, suffered poverty and want, became acquainted with Mendelssohn, learned languages, immersed himself in Kant’s writings, and wrote books of philosophy and logic in German. An Essay Toward the New Logic is described as his book, as a correction to Kant’s logic, and as influenced by Stoic logic and especially by Talmudic logic, in which he had grown up and with which he occupied himself in his finest years, “as he recounts in his autobiography in German and in a Hebrew translation by Taviov,” with mention of a later edition, “from 1954 I think, Ben Tamar or something.” Maimon is also presented as a great admirer of Maimonides, and therefore called himself Shlomo Maimon, while his original name is given as “Shlomo ben Yehoshua, I think.”
Giv'at HaMoreh is described as a handwritten commentary on Part I of Guide of the Perplexed, with speculation about additional parts that are no longer extant, while “this isn’t a commentary and it isn’t an explanation; it’s simply his own doctrine, and he does it around Maimonides,” and at times he “appropriates Maimonides to himself in a sometimes pretty blunt way.” It is claimed that Maimonides influenced Maimon mainly as an opening and an act of daring to deal with philosophical issues, not necessarily as a dramatic influence in content, and it is said that “the eternal greatness of Maimonides? There’s no such thing for Shlomo Maimon.”
The famous letter from Kant to Marcus Herz is cited, in which Kant says that he did not want to read Maimon’s remarks because he had no time and was already sixty-six years old, but when he skimmed them he understood that here was a person who truly understood what he meant. The speaker claims that the passage under study “is drawn from Shlomo Maimon in one way or another,” and that there is a hint to this in note 73, and even that it “corresponds with more than just note 73” in the sections under discussion.
The Eddington Joke and Remarks on the Historiography of “Returning to Religion”
The speaker recounts the story of Arthur Eddington, the British physicist, when someone told him that only three people in the world understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he replied, “Who’s the third?” The speaker adds ironically that the things one really can’t understand are not relativity but “the Torah,” thus drawing a parallel between stories of prestige and aura and conceptions of understanding.
A satirical remark appears to the effect that in “two or three hundred years” a book may come out saying that Shlomo Maimon returned to religion at the end of his life and regretted his mistakes, similar to stories told about “all the famous heretical Jews or famous gentiles like Aristotle,” including claims such as “Maimonides repented at the end of his life and continued with Kabbalah.” This is presented as a mechanism whereby “everyone gets annexed to the correct camp in the end,” and it is called “modern historiography.”
Hume, Kant, and the Synthetic A Priori as the Basis of Science
The speaker explains Kant’s distinctions: noumena/phenomena, analytic/synthetic, a priori/a posteriori, and Kant’s innovation that there are “synthetic a priori judgments.” He defines a priori judgments as knowledge without experience and gives examples such as “two quantities equal to a third quantity are equal to each other” and the law of non-contradiction, and defines a posteriori judgments as things learned from observation, like “this table is gray.” He defines analytic judgments as those that follow from analyzing a concept, such as “the ball is round,” and synthetic judgments as those that require additional information, such as “this ball is heavy.”
The speaker presents the dilemma from which Kant begins: analytic judgments add no information, and synthetic judgments depend on experience, yet Hume showed that experience does not justify generalizations, induction, or causality. He brings Hume’s question about tomorrow’s sunrise, and his critique of inferring causality from mere temporal sequence, as with a log in a fire and the gap between “always comes after” and “caused.” He describes the skeptical escalation: scientific methodology cannot be grounded, because the analytic adds no knowledge and the synthetic lacks general justification.
Kant is presented as one who refuses skepticism and goes “in reverse,” by assuming that scientific knowledge is possible and asking what must be assumed in order to justify that. According to the speaker, Kant translates Hume’s questions into one question: “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?”—that is, judgments that add something new about the world without relying on experience. The speaker also brings in Reichenbach’s distinction between the “context of discovery,” in which a theory does not arise from observations, and the “context of justification,” in which it is tested in the laboratory, and argues that science raises hypotheses that are not derived from experience even though it tests them by experience.
Kant: The Fit Between Consciousness and the World, and the Perception of Phenomena
The speaker describes Kant’s solution through the idea of a fit between the structure of cognition and the world of phenomena, so that what is hewn “from within me” can be true about the world as it appears to me. He formulates three possible ways of synchronization: that the world affects me, that I affect the world, or that someone outside synchronizes things, and notes that Kant lists two and evades the third. He presents Kant as concluding that if the world cannot justify regularity through experience in a way that solves Hume’s problems, then the laws of nature relate not to the world as it is in itself but to its appearance to us, and therefore they are subject to the prism of our “cognitive faculties.”
In this way the distinction is built between the thing in itself and the thing as perceived, and science is understood as explaining data already processed by the subject. The speaker adds a personal critique of the Kantian move, arguing that it resembles a move in which one assumes the conclusion and then searches for the premises that justify it, calling this a transition from philosophy to theology, in the style of: “A philosopher assumes premises and derives conclusions from them, while a theologian assumes conclusions and derives premises from them.” He claims that this is “what Maimonides did,” and adds that from Kant onward, “philosophy too became theological.”
Leibniz, the Identity of Indiscernibles, and Kant on Substance and Properties
The speaker brings Leibniz’s “principle of the identity of indiscernibles,” according to which if two entities are equal in all their properties then they are the same entity, and explains that the argument assumes there is nothing beyond properties. He claims that his own common sense says otherwise, and presents Kant as distinguishing between properties as the mode of appearance and some “hylomorphic something” of the thing in itself that is not seen. According to this account, the question whether there is one substance or two pertains to the thing in itself and is not derived from the identity of properties, and their being two is a separate question from the question of the identity of their properties.
Shlomo Maimon Against Kant: The Thing-in-Itself Within Consciousness and a Network of Knowledge
Shlomo Maimon is presented as one who “returns to Leibniz” and argues that the substance is the totality of statements made about it, and the motivation for this is that Kant “did not really answer the questions he posed for himself.” According to the speaker, Maimon argues that even what Kant calls “the thing in itself” is in consciousness and not in the world, and that within consciousness we have a grasp of essences beyond the grasp of properties, but that too is our own grasp. It is mentioned that the concept of God in Maimon is “a very interesting concept” and is connected to “the infinite intellect or something like that,” while also stating that there are problems both in Kant and in Maimon, and every solution pays “a price somewhere else.”
The speaker proposes a modern image of a “network” for understanding Maimon, and connects this to Quine, who argues that human knowledge is built as a web of connections so that there is no isolated local definition. In this picture, the “objects” are nodes in the network, and the judgments/properties are the connections between the nodes, and everything is “one weave” located in consciousness. He explains that the node itself is an abstraction of the meeting-point of the connections, and in that sense “there are no nodes”; the object is only the meeting-point of the relations, and therefore there is nothing in the thing beyond the collection of properties/statements about it.
The Unity of God, Judgment, and Inference: An Essay Toward the New Logic and the Supreme Logical Unity
The speaker reads the last sentence in section 24: “That which includes the unity of God, judgment, and inference, which is the goal of the new logic, the supreme logical unity,” and points to note 73: “Shlomo Maimon, An Essay Toward the New Logic, etc.” He interprets “name” as the subject of the proposition or the concept, “judgment” as the proposition said about the subject, and “inference” as the system of reasoning in which propositions follow from one another, and shows that in the network model these are the node, the connection, and the relations between connections.
The claim is that if these layers are constructions of consciousness, then there is no “concept in itself,” and language with subject and predicate is a tool for breaking down a total perception into components in order to enable communication. The speaker argues that the Nazir accepts the unity on the level of principle “in the infinite intellect,” whereas for us the distinctions of matter/form and thing-in-itself/as-perceived still appear, but there is a possibility “to bite off more and more of the matter” and expand the grasp of form until the thing in itself disappears.
Non-Verbal Thought, the Rashba, and Tosafot on Whether Mental Reflection Counts as Speech
The speaker weaves in a Talmudic-exegetical issue about verbal versus non-verbal thinking through the Rashba in Berakhot on the dispute over “one who recited the Shema but did not make it audible to his ear,” and the difficulty of how Rabbi Yose could derive “two things from it” from a single word. He brings the Rashba’s explanation that if one need not make it audible to the ear, then there is no requirement of speech, because “thoughts do not belong to language,” and notes that questions are raised from Tosafot in tractate Shabbat 49 about the possibility of thinking in a language. He qualifies this by saying that the more precise conclusion is that there is a deeper non-verbal stratum, even if one can also think in words.
From this he argues that the basic perception of understanding is global and not formulated in language, and that in order to “translate” it into communication one must break it down into concepts and propositions according to the rules of speech. He also connects this to modern conceptions of the brain as a neural network, and to the description that a child grasps distinctions before being taught words like “blue.”
Infinite Intellect, Matter and Form, and the Unity of the Intellect, the Intellecting Subject, and the Intelligible Object
The speaker connects Maimon to the unity that Maimonides calls “the unity of the intellect, the intellecting subject, and the intelligible object,” and argues that Maimon presents the unity as perfect in the infinite intellect but not in the finite intellect, and therefore for us there arises the illusion of matter, form, and the thing in itself. He formulates Maimon’s view as follows: “there is no distinction between matter and form,” and matter is “all the forms we have not yet grasped,” whereas the infinite intellect grasps “the whole network at once,” and therefore for it everything is form and a pattern of form.
The speaker suggests that this becomes “clear” to the point that he worries he is beginning to be convinced, and suggests that a good way to clarify an idea is to seriously try to defend what one disagrees with and then switch sides. He concludes by connecting this to religious language: “From the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He, there are no things that exist on their own; everything is Him,” and in the “world of the infinite” there is nothing outside the infinite, and therefore there is no thing in itself. Only from our point of view as separate beings does duality exist, whereas cleaving to God and the revelation of a “divine point” lead to a picture in which “the whole network is inside me.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, this starts getting complicated in this specific passage, in terms of what’s being talked about here—not the overall move. And I’m not one hundred percent sure I understand. I looked at it five minutes ago and it didn’t sound all that sharp, but even if I do understand, I’m still not one hundred percent sure I agree. Fine, let’s see what we do with this business. What we have here is basically a philosophy lesson on Shlomo Maimon. Shlomo Maimon was an interesting Jew. What?
[Speaker B] Right, not exactly a student.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, he wrote a commentary on Guide of the Perplexed, Giv'at HaMoreh. Right, right. In his own handwriting.
[Speaker B] He wrote—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In his own holy hand, as it says here. If you look at Arthur Eddington—what does that remind you of? Arthur. Ah, there’s a famous story about Arthur Eddington, the British physicist who traveled—so someone came to him and said: I heard there are only three people in the world who understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. So he said, who’s the third? Well, okay, relativity is just nonsense; what’s really impossible to understand is the Torah. Compared to that, relativity is trivial—he didn’t say that about them. In any case, if you want to know who Shlomo Maimon is, then it says here a little lower down, under section 21: An Essay Toward the New Logic. That’s a book written by Shlomo Maimon. What? No, An Essay Toward the New Logic is Maimon. He wrote—it says below in note 59. See it? Maimon’s An Essay Toward the New Logic, which is a correction of Kant’s logic and is influenced by Stoic logic and especially by Talmudic logic, in which he grew up and with which he occupied himself in his finest years, as he recounts in his autobiography in German and in a Hebrew translation by Taviov, or maybe there’s something newer than that from 1954, I think, Ben Tamar or something. He was a famous child prodigy, married at fourteen, filled his belly with the Talmud and halakhic decisors, could have been a rabbi, you understand? Then afterward he learned and then departed. Here too, anyone can be a rabbi—you just have to learn Shabbat; I learned and departed and I was done. Afterward he learned and departed, came to Berlin, suffered poverty and want, became acquainted with Mendelssohn, learned languages, immersed himself in Kant’s writings, and wrote books of philosophy and logic in German. Maimon’s influence was great on modern scholars of logic, and so on. What? An important Jew. There’s a book by Bergman on Shlomo—
[Speaker B] Maimon.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whoever is interested can read it there. It’s a somewhat difficult book, but I think it’s worth reading. There are a few interesting things there.
[Speaker B] What is he? What did he say?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, it’s hard to explain in one foot what exactly my issue is here, meaning what. There’s some answer here. I assume that in another two or three hundred years some book will come out saying that at the end of his life Shlomo Maimon returned to religion, and secretly told someone—something no one knows—that he regretted all the mistakes he made and understood that really everything is true, and everything he wrote and all the books that say so. Like all the famous heretical Jews, or famous gentiles like Aristotle—
[Speaker B] There isn’t—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —a single one about whom there isn’t some story that at the end of his life he repented. As if Maimonides repented at the end of his life—
[Speaker B] —and continued—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —with Kabbalah and so on. In the end everyone gets annexed to the right camp.
[Speaker B] Fine.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Modern historiography.
[Speaker B] In any—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] case, this Jew was very much his own man. As described here, he grew up as a yeshiva student, was apparently a great prodigy, but like everyone who eventually leaves, both he himself says it and people around him tell stories that he was a great prodigy. Even today, probably. Anyone who becomes a journalist or something and says he once studied in Hebron Yeshiva, in Ponevezh, in who-knows-where—he was the prodigy of Ponevezh and Hebron. There isn’t one who wasn’t a prodigy there, out of all the poor souls who later go out into the world. In any case, he probably really was a prodigy, because it’s clear that he was a very talented person. I don’t know what he was like over there, but it’s completely clear that he was very talented. And at some point he really studied philosophy, immersed himself in Kant’s writings and all that. He was a great admirer of Maimonides, and that’s why he called himself Shlomo Maimon. He wrote a commentary—he called himself Shlomo Maimon; that wasn’t his original name. Not his original name, he called himself that. Shlomo ben Yehoshua, I think. And he composed a very interesting commentary, by the way, on Guide of the Perplexed called Giv'at HaMoreh. We only have it on Part I of Guide of the Perplexed. About the last two parts there is speculation that he also wrote on them, but at least we don’t have them. This commentary, as people say, is not a commentary of course, it’s not—no, no, it’s not an explanation in the sense Rabbi Kook uses in the introduction. And it’s neither a commentary nor an explanation; it’s simply his own doctrine. He does it around Maimonides. He appropriates Maimonides to himself in a way that is sometimes pretty blunt. There was some influence of Maimonides on him. They always say it wasn’t such a dramatic influence except for the sheer daring he found there, the opening Maimonides gave him, the desire to deal with issues of this sort. In that sense, Maimonides certainly influenced him, in the philosophical issues.
[Speaker B] The eternal greatness of Maimonides? There’s no such thing for Shlomo Maimon.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll talk about that a bit in a moment. In any case, that’s the man. He was—what?
[Speaker B] What is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —that book?
[Speaker B] The History of Korman? Ah yes, The History of Korman, presumably that’s what it looks like.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, yes, there is Kant’s famous letter to Marcus Herz. Marcus Herz was some Jewish doctor who was also close to Kant. And he passed on to Kant, I think, objections from Shlomo Maimon, or some book by Shlomo Maimon for Kant to read, in which he raises difficulties and disputes him and so on. And Kant writes that at first he didn’t want to read it at all, because he didn’t have time and he was already an old man of sixty-six and had no strength for this. But when he skimmed it on first glance, he suddenly understood that at last there was one Jew—or one human being—who really understood what he meant, what he was trying to say. He writes something along those lines—not exactly that wording, but something like it. So apparently he understood what Kant said and still argued with him. It seems to me there are a few things in him that somehow connect to one doctrine. I don’t know the material well enough to describe it succinctly. As you know, in order to describe something succinctly you have to know it well. And I don’t know Shlomo Maimon that well, but I think it would be worth getting to know him more deeply. I took a quick look in the book again before this learning session, because here it’s clear to me that this whole thing is drawn from Shlomo Maimon in one way or another. He even hints at it in note 73, but in my opinion he’s corresponding with him beyond note 73—the influence of Shlomo Maimon here on these sections. What Shlomo Maimon basically argued was something like this. Kant, of course, divided the world into the thing as it is in itself, the noumena, and the phenomena, and the thing as we perceive it. And in the end he did not give—and so on—and there are other divisions in Kant too; we talked about them maybe in other contexts. Kant also had other famous distinctions: analytic and synthetic judgments, a priori and a posteriori judgments. His innovation was that there is a category called synthetic a priori judgments. Synthetic a priori judgments means judgments that are compositional, not analytical. We already talked about this—I just don’t remember with whom. You probably weren’t there, but maybe you were, I don’t remember anymore. You probably know it from reading. I don’t remember if it was you or Itay—so just—
[Speaker B] I don’t remember.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? You were there? In any case, Kant said that there are what are called synthetic a priori judgments. He had to arrive at this innovation in order to answer various difficulties, mainly those raised by Hume, and it had already begun to take shape before that. Hume—Hume—was it Hume? I’ll explain briefly. Really, I just don’t—it’s not really necessary here to describe all of Shlomo Maimon’s philosophy, but on the other hand I didn’t exactly grasp the point the Nazir is latching onto here. And so I think I would have needed a few more days to sit on this, but it just didn’t work out over the last few days. Synthetic a priori judgments means the following. There are a priori and a posteriori judgments. A priori judgments are judgments that I know without experience, meaning without resorting to experience, like: two quantities equal to a third are equal to each other. I don’t learn that from experience; it’s a logical rule that I know beforehand. Or the law of non-contradiction, yes, or that something is either true or not true, or that something cannot be true and not true at the same time, yes, all kinds of statements of that sort. There are judgments that are a posteriori—for example, that this table is gray. That’s a judgment I cannot know without experience, without simply observing, seeing the table and understanding that it is gray. That’s the distinction between a priori and a posteriori judgments. There is another distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments. Analytic judgments are judgments where the predicate in the judgment is simply derived from analysis of the subject of the judgment. For example, the ball is round. That is an analytic judgment because embedded in the concept of a ball is the fact that it is round. You don’t need any additional information except to understand properly what a ball is. You have to analyze the concept, which is why it is called analytic—analysis means to analyze. You need to analyze the concept of ball, and then we know that the ball is round. A synthetic judgment, on the other hand, is a judgment that requires adding more information from outside; it does not follow merely from analyzing the subject itself. For example, the ball is heavy, this ball is heavy. That does not follow from the very concept of ball. It’s something that requires a synthesis with additional information beyond what is embedded in the concept of ball, and only then can I say that judgment. So that is a synthetic judgment. Seemingly we have here two distinctions, right? Two independent distinctions that should create four types of judgments. This may be familiar. There should be synthetic a priori judgments, synthetic a posteriori judgments, analytic a priori judgments, and analytic a posteriori judgments, right? But that is not so, it is not so. At first glance there are only two types, not four. Every a priori judgment is analytic and vice versa, and every a posteriori judgment is synthetic and vice versa. At least that’s how it seems; that’s how it looks.
[Speaker B] What a person comes with without experience—I’ll explain in a second.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] An a priori judgment is a judgment I know without experience, yes, that’s the claim. If I know it without experience, then where do I know it from? If I don’t need to look, then what? Then presumably if I say something about some subject X—X is such and such, has such and such a property—if I know that without experience, then where does it come from? Presumably from analyzing the concept X, right? Let’s go in the other direction; that’s even clearer. Fine, this side is a bit more problematic, but the other side is even clearer. If I make an analytic judgment, it is certainly a priori, right? To prove that an a priori judgment is analytic may require a somewhat subtler argument, but an analytic judgment is certainly a priori. Because what does an analytic judgment mean? It means I only need to analyze the subject in order to know what to say about it, so certainly I do not need experience for it, right? So certainly I can do it without experience because I only need to analyze the subject, so certainly an analytic judgment—
[Speaker B] —is a priori.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know what a ball is; I look it up in a dictionary, doesn’t matter. But it doesn’t involve any observation. I know the concept ball. I wasn’t born with the concept ball, but that does not involve any concrete observation. I know it from the definition of the concept itself. And now with regard to the other two types—a posteriori judgments and synthetic judgments—they too generally coincide. Because a synthetic judgment—let’s begin by explaining one direction; I can’t go into too much detail—but a synthetic judgment is a judgment where analyzing the concept is not enough in order to state it, right? So what extra addition from outside is there? Where do you get that outside addition from apart from knowing the concept? What else is there? Only observation, right? To look and know. Therefore it is a posteriori. A synthetic judgment is a posteriori. You can try thinking of concrete judgments. Just take examples of judgments and you’ll see that all the examples will really be either analytic a priori or synthetic a posteriori. There won’t be an example of analytic a posteriori or synthetic a priori. All right? That’s just how it comes out. Now on the other hand, there is an impossible dilemma here, and that dilemma says the following. The question is: how can we advance in science? How can we add scientific knowledge? If we do it analytically—if the scientific judgment is analytic—then we haven’t added knowledge; we’ve only further analyzed what we already know, right? I know what the concept ball is; I analyze it and understand that the ball is round. To know that the ball is round, assuming I knew what the concept ball means, is not additional information, right? There is never any addition of information in an analytic judgment. On the other hand, a synthetic judgment does have added information, but the question is how I can know it. So you can tell me: from experience. That was our claim—after all, a synthetic judgment is a posteriori; that’s exactly what we said. Look at experience and see. But here Hume came with a whole series of difficulties and showed that from experience you cannot derive general judgments. He gave very simple arguments. For example: you know that the sun has risen every morning until today—how do you know it will rise tomorrow too? How can you formulate the judgment that the sun rises every morning? Who says?
[Speaker B] Who says it will rise tomorrow too? Fine, it’s happened a lot—it’s customary.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, customary—how do you know that at all? What does “a lot, customary” mean? There is something you know about the world.
[Speaker B] So that’s an inference from experience.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not an inference from experience. Experience—fine, what was was. But the question is: what does that say about tomorrow? Fine, until today the sun rose every morning. Who says it will tomorrow too? Who says that? This is induction, essentially, and the question is what grounds induction—not mathematical induction; scientific induction. Mathematical induction just shares the same name. Mathematical induction is deduction, unless you suffer from intuitionism. That’s a mathematical approach that claims mathematical induction is not deduction and therefore is not an acceptable proof in mathematics. That’s called intuitionism—there are such people in mathematics. There are pathological cases who believe that ridiculous thing, but we won’t deal with that now. It’s just some technical stubbornness of some hairsplitters, that it doesn’t fit the rules of the game of mathematics and therefore I won’t accept it as a valid proof. Fine, leave the nonsense aside—is it true or not true? Of course it’s true. Something proved by induction is certainly true. Anyone who argues with that—you can just eulogize him. In any case, if so, then the question is how we infer conclusions about general judgments. So Hume challenged both induction and causality. How can you infer from observation that event A is the cause of event B? All you know is that event A occurred and immediately afterward event B occurred. How do you know it is the cause of event B? All you saw was temporal succession; you did not see the connection between them. You did not see that putting a log into fire caused it to burn. You only saw that every time a log is put into the fire, it comes out burnt. But where does the concept of causing come from? The concept of cause in the active sense, not just in the sense of temporal succession—that event B always comes after event A—but where does it come from that there is causation here? That certainly is not something that comes from observation. It is a way in which you relate to the observation; it is a way of interpreting the observation. The observation itself gave you event A followed immediately by event B. That’s what you saw. Now from here to infer that event A also caused B—from where? Who said yes, who said no? Where does the very concept of caused come from? That’s another question. Where does the concept of caused come from at all, if it does not come from observation? Where did it come from? Pure speculation. So indeed Hume argued that it’s all speculation and there are no such things. Fine, wonderful, if it’s all speculation. But now the question is how do we proceed, how do we accumulate scientific knowledge? Analytic judgments, as we said, do not add knowledge, and synthetic judgments cannot be justified by scientific means.
[Speaker B] You’re trying—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —to justify the principle of induction by means of induction too. Meaning, since I used induction many times and it worked, therefore I’m allowed to use induction. But tomorrow what?
[Speaker B] Bottom line, it works. I build airplanes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not by guessing, not by guessing. So you can build airplanes? The question is where your confidence comes from that you can also get on that airplane. Fact. Okay, fact—what fact? Is everything a fact? There’s a fact that someone speaks slander, so is slander permitted? The question is why it’s justified. This is not a matter of guessing. I’ve flown on airplanes maybe thousands of times. By faith in airplanes—if he had airplanes, he’d travel by them. The question is what is the philosophical basis for your confidence in getting on an airplane. And bottom line it’s safe, period. You can say “who says,” but bottom line it’s safe. Did you hear the answer in the sentence you just said? I asked why, and you said bottom line it’s safe. Right, you answered me about the fact that bottom line it’s safe. I’m asking why. But you don’t need to. What do you mean, you don’t need to? These are just questions. What do you mean, just questions? What is the logical, philosophical basis for your trust in induction? Just because you’re captive to that conception? You’re captive to that conception, but what do you do? You fly on airplanes, right. You do lots of other foolish things too.
[Speaker B] I don’t think there is such a thing; it’s like a joke.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What’s the problem? If there’s a person who desecrates the Sabbath, then do you tell him—
[Speaker B] Wait, but that’s not the same.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, he too is desecrating the Sabbath, bottom line. So what does that mean? But what is your trust? What is your trust in scientific laws? What is your trust in what you know about the world? No, I didn’t get an answer. Huh? But that’s exactly the question. I’m asking: what is the validity of learning from experience? So you want to justify the principle of induction by second-order induction, that since induction has worked many times, therefore I have confidence in the principle of induction.
[Speaker B] In the principle of induction. Fine, where does probability come in?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I asked about a thousand times and it works. What does that have to do with probability? In probability theory it certainly has nothing to do with it. Independent events—you can throw a die, and it fell a hundred times on the number one. What will it fall on the hundred-and-first throw? One-sixth probability for each number. Fine, what does that have to do with it? Probability is not relevant here at all.
[Speaker B] Fine, I didn’t get it—one thousand and one times and you’re optimistic. That—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —means that a thousand times you were lucky. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times you were lucky.
[Speaker B] Would he really say it like that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Really? I’m asking you what the justification for this is. And I’m saying there is no justification. In the end he says there is no justification, and that’s it. In any case, they babble, but it’s babble with some substance. Here, that’s true—but babble with some substance, I think. Because once you find the answers, then you see: the goal is not to tell you not to get on an airplane. The goal is to try, in a less aggressive way—there are people who attack everything with a sweep of the hand, arrogantly, that’s how they speak. But I understand it as a way of penetrating one layer deeper, to understand what my various beliefs are based on, to try to understand a little of what lies behind them. In any case, what emerges is that there is really no way to ground scientific methodology. Analytically it can’t be done, synthetically it isn’t justified, so I can’t add information. Then Kant comes and redirects all these questions and essentially says that all these questions map onto the question: how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? There is an intermediate category here. Synthetic a priori judgments do exist. Analytic a posteriori—Kant said no; today there are people who think yes. In my opinion that’s a matter of definition. But synthetic a priori—Kant claimed that there are such judgments. What does—
[Speaker B] —a synthetic a priori judgment mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s say it again. Synthetic a priori judgments means judgments that say something about the subject of the judgment—I mean really say something, as distinct from merely analyzing it—say something new about the subject of the judgment without looking at it. Notice: without looking at it, because it is a priori, before experience. So I can say something new that is not derived from the subject itself by analytic means, and I can say it about this thing without looking at it. That sounds like a contradiction, right? So how do I know it if it isn’t derived from analyzing the subject itself? And on the other hand I’m doing it without looking at it, so where does it come from? In any case, Kant first of all goes in the opposite direction, as constructive philosophers tend to do—this is exactly the previous point. Kant does not want to end in skepticism, so Kant says: let’s assume there is no skepticism. Now let’s see what we need to assume for that. So Kant’s first conclusion was that in order for that to be so, we have to assume that there are synthetic a priori judgments, because otherwise we really remain in the same dilemma: analytic judgments add no information, and synthetic judgments are not justified. So now, how can it be that I can justify the process of adding information not on the basis of experience? Because experience does not provide that justification. So Kant comes and says first of all: let’s translate the question properly. What needs to be said in general is a translation of all of Hume’s questions at once—that’s the translation of them. And their translation is: how can there be judgments which on the one hand are synthetic, meaning they say something about the world beyond the trivial, beyond the analytic, and on the other hand are a priori, meaning not derived from experience. All right? And these are basically the fundamental judgments through which science advances.
[Speaker B] But science does rely on experience.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Science tests its hypothesis by experience, but it raises its hypotheses in the context of justification and the context of discovery, as they divide it in Reichenbach. The context of discovery is where I invent a theory—how? The mind churns, divine inspiration, whatever. Then afterward there is the context of justification, where I subject it to tests in the laboratory. I look and see whether it is true or not true. If it is not true, I throw it out. If it withstands the tests, I keep it. But it did not arise from the experiments—
[Speaker B] It just arose.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Historically, there are cases where they did arise from induction. True. And that can be included in the context of discovery. The context of discovery is synthetic a priori. And that’s exactly the point. Because you are raising a judgment about the world, but not out of the observations. So in translation, this is a translation between problems in different areas of philosophy. These are problems in the philosophy of science—the context of discovery and justification. And these are problems in epistemology and psychology and methodology of—
[Speaker B] Synthetic—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] a priori. But in practice, they can be mapped onto one another.
[Speaker B] Because you saw the cow outside—like, would a blind person say it the way you do?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But it does not follow from the results. It doesn’t matter how you saw the results—
[Speaker B] You connect threads, make a knot out of threads.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re not connecting anything. You can make connections with these threads, and you can arrive at infinitely many theories. Okay, in short, to our matter: Kant says that what we need here are synthetic a priori judgments. How can there be synthetic a priori judgments? Kant says you have to say that there is a fit between us and the world, right? That’s basically what he says. I produce judgments from within myself without looking at the world, and they come out true about the world. That means that something in me matches, in some way, the structure of the world, right? I can extract, carve out from within myself, laws that will be laws of nature that are true of the world. To test them—not every law I produce is true—that’s the context of justification. But there is a way to advance. How can such a thing be possible? How is this fit created, how is this marvelous coordination produced? So there are three possibilities; Kant of course lists only two, he tries to evade the third. Maybe not consciously, but he evades the third. Let’s try to understand this a bit. One possibility is that the world affects me. Meaning, how does a connection arise between two things? Right? A simple connection: the world just affects me. And therefore I’m built like the world. Not through the senses—I don’t know—through some other means.
[Speaker B] But that’s another question.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, let’s not get into the details here; I’m really only giving a schematic description to understand the context. But the influence of the world on me—what does that actually mean? It means that when I produce a scientific theory, it is basically derived from the world. Which takes us right back to Hume’s picture, but we already rejected that, right? There is no situation where, by looking at the world, a scientific theory simply follows from it. It doesn’t follow from there. Right? So that doesn’t work; the world does not affect me. Fine, so maybe I affect the world? That’s the second possibility, in order to explain how the two of us are coordinated.
[Speaker B] But then how do I know it in advance?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, what’s the problem? You affect the fact that the airplane flies correctly. The third possibility, which Kant of course does not mention, is that there is someone outside taking care of this synchronization—that is, between the two possibilities. Within those possibilities, this is a kind of description Leibniz gives regarding a different problem, the problem of body and soul. He raises three possibilities, and presumably there too he chooses the third. But in the Kantian context—after all, Leibniz came before him—so he ignores the third possibility. And basically he presents it as: if the world doesn’t affect me, then apparently I affect the world. Otherwise how could there be a fit between us? How does this miracle happen? Kant says: we must say that the laws of science, the laws of nature, do not deal with the world as it is in itself, but rather with its appearance to our eyes. The goal is not—when I formulate laws of nature about objects—I am not formulating laws of nature about the objects themselves; I am formulating laws of nature about how I see them, right? After all, those are the phenomena recorded before me, and those are the phenomena subject to the laws of nature. Now, how I see the objects passes through my prism, right? It passes through my cognitive apparatus, right? So since it passes through my cognitive apparatus, it is no wonder that I in fact affect the world. Again, not the world as it is in itself, but the world described by the laws of nature. Why do I affect it? Through my means of reception, my sense apparatus. When I perceive the world, it passes through my senses, and therefore there is already some fingerprint of my sensory apparatus on the data. And it is those data that science comes along and explains. So science is carved out from within me, but the data too are in a substantial sense processed by me. So that is why there can be a relation between the two things.
[Speaker B] Right? Would you fly in that airplane in the world as it is in itself?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It wouldn’t be flying in the world as it is in itself. How would it?
[Speaker B] But after all it doesn’t—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —affect the world. Everything that happens to it happens only in his head. Right? The fact that you’re flying in an airplane is your description. What is the real relation between you and yourself and an airplane in itself? God knows. Maybe there are no relations at all in the world as it is in itself, in the Kantian world. Fine, there are many problems in the theory; let’s not get into all that. I don’t agree with it at all, but never mind. So that’s how, through all these questions, you arrive at this distinction between the thing in itself and the thing as I see it. That is more or less the move, in short. Okay? All right.
[Speaker B] Now explain, because you’re doing the same thing too, no less significantly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You also say: I’ll hold on to what I hold on to, I’m sure of it—so why are you asking questions? You too are assuming what you want. When he asks questions, you say, what do you want? I’m assuming that I’m okay with what I’m doing. And that is exactly what Kant did here, exactly what he did. He said: I want to assume that my belief is justified; let’s see what it could stem from. Which is basically, instead of doing philosophy, becoming a theologian instead of a philosopher. Right? What’s the difference between a theologian and a philosopher—you know. A philosopher assumes premises and derives conclusions from them, and a theologian assumes the conclusions and derives from them the premises. There is no theologian who, because of his proof for the existence of God, becomes a believing person; I don’t think such a thing has ever existed. Usually he believed in God first, and afterward built a proof that would lead him there. Theology always assumes the conclusions, and from them derives the premises that supposedly can lead to those conclusions; but the order of work is ostensibly the reverse.
[Speaker B] And that’s what Maimonides did. So from Kant onward, philosophy too—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —became theological, and especially from Kant onward. Meaning, philosophy too basically wants to assume a few things and asks what I need to assume in order to reach these conclusions that I want to attain—
[Speaker B] —so that it won’t be embarrassing that everyone already arrived at those conclusions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right? That’s why I say that a constructive view of philosophy should not be to look for explanations of things in the sense of a test—either they’re true or they’re false; if there’s no explanation then it isn’t true. The constructive form of philosophy is to try to expose what basic assumptions underlie my fundamental intuitions. My fundamental intuitions are certainly true, because without them I also can’t explain other things. When I look for explanations, they will be explanations based on my basic intuitions, my common sense, right? There is no point in asking why this is true, because in what terms do you want to find an explanation for it? In terms of common sense? That’s exactly what I’m asking about. So basically, what you can do in philosophy is to try and ask: assuming my common sense is correct, what assumptions are embedded behind it? In other words, what am I assuming in order to reach this conclusion, and what am I committed to? And as a result, of course, I uncover all sorts of things to which I am committed if I really want to hold on to those fundamental intuitions that I have. That is what’s called constructive philosophy. Not to undermine my basic perceptions, but to try to understand what price I have to pay in order to continue thinking that they’re true—meaning, what assumptions underlie those perceptions. All right. So here Kant began asking much broader methodological questions than our immediate issue. Basically Kant created a kind of dichotomy between the world as it is in itself and the way I perceive it. And then you can continue that further and say that all the things I say about objects or about the world are really things that exist only within me. In the world itself there is only some kind of formless primordial thing, a kind of thing-in-itself—that is, nothing else, just some sort of thing around which all the qualities revolve as they appear within me. Or in other words: let’s divide it into matter and form. The matter of the thing is the thing itself stripped of all its form, of all its qualities; and the form and the qualities and all that are a function of the perceiver. And that is what he says here: because it is a function of the perceiver, it is not so surprising that I can make statements that arise from within me and they will be true about the phenomenal world, because the phenomenal world too is, in a substantial sense, influenced by my means—my cognitive means and my thinking. One of the considerations that leads to this argument is a principle of Leibniz, known as the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Meaning, if there are two objects—
[Speaker B] What does that have to do here with the substance of the body? It can’t exist in reality, or is it…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly the point. What do you mean, it can’t exist in reality? If it exists in reality, then it is the same object—so it’s not two objects.
[Speaker B] Meaning, if you—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —see in the world two objects that are completely identical in all their properties, then apparently you’re not looking at two objects, you’re looking at one.
[Speaker B] And if they differ in their place?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. Place and time are an issue that many dealt with around Leibniz’s argument. Leibniz himself already spoke about it. He claims that place and time are expressions of other changes. And Maimon too—Maimon in many ways returned to Leibniz. After Kant he went back to Leibniz. But never mind, I really don’t want to get too far into the details; I’m expanding too much. So what does Leibniz’s argument really assume? It basically assumes that there is in fact nothing beyond a thing’s properties, right? Because if all the properties are identical, then it’s the same object.
[Speaker B] What does common sense say?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think common sense, at least mine, says not that way. What does it say? And here Kant enters the picture: no, there are properties. If I look at this, I see a picture, and if I look at that, I also see the same picture. As we said earlier, the properties are what I see of the object, but they are not the object itself.
[Speaker B] The object itself—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —is the object that bears those properties, even though—
[Speaker B] —such a thing—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —is not seen at all. To see the object in itself—what would that even mean? To see it is to begin with its properties; that’s what it means to see it. So how do I distinguish the object itself? By identifying all its properties. That’s how I distinguish the object itself. Right. But one can understand that there are two objects, each of which has exactly the same properties as the other, and still they are two. Even with the same form, and still they are two. And this whole thing is obvious—even in the same place and time. And this whole point is a subtle one. Kant said something similar about concepts, not about objects. Fine. So that was Leibniz’s assumption. Here, exactly at this point, Kant disagrees with him. Because Kant claims that all the properties are only the way we see the object, but beyond that there is also some kind of primordial something in the world called the object in itself. Therefore, if I want to ask whether there is one object or two objects, the question concerns the object in itself, not the way I see it. And therefore the question whether it is the same object or two objects does not follow from the fact that they have the same properties or do not have the same properties. That is another question—whether the two objects are identical or different. But their being two is a completely separate question from whether their properties are identical. That is basically what follows according to Kant, right? Kant distinguishes between the thing in itself and how I see it; in his view, that is basically the thing’s properties. In this sense, Shlomo Maimon returns to Leibniz. Shlomo Maimon claims that the object really is the totality of the things I say about it. That is the object. And his motivation for this—and again, this is too long a topic to get into here—but his motivation is that Kant, in his view, and here I completely agree with him, did not really answer the questions he set for himself. And without going into the details right now, the point is that he wants to say that even what Kant calls the thing in itself—which in Kant is a highly detailed concept, but never mind—even what Kant calls the thing in itself is something that exists in consciousness and not in the world. And these are two parts of consciousness, that’s all. And the object is that part which is beyond—
[Speaker B] —the properties.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the whole meaning of the matter is that I see it as existing outside consciousness. That is basically to say that I have a certain experience in consciousness which is different from merely perceiving properties. And that is the perception of the thing’s substantiality, its thinghood. But that too is really only my perception. All right? So Maimon basically says that both these things exist in consciousness. So Maimon says, Maimon says—what? Oops, okay, fine. From the side of nothing, from the axiomatic side, this is connected to the thing in itself. Although the concept of God in Maimon is a very interesting concept; it is probably somewhat exceptional in this description.
[Speaker B] He does think there is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —such a concept, and he does give it at least some objective status—the infinite intellect or something like that. A basic concept for him is God. What? It’s a basic thing that we’ll talk about; it exists in his consciousness. Yes, right, but within your consciousness you can distinguish between levels of something—
[Speaker B] —more or less objective.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Most nominally. There are problems with Shlomo Maimon too; I can’t… It’s clear that there are problems in Maimon’s structure too. Kant didn’t solve all the problems, and neither did he. Kant solved something in one place and paid a price elsewhere—you know, whenever you solve a problem like this you pay a price somewhere else; you have to decide which price you are more willing to pay. There is no philosophy that solves everything, I think. In any case, Maimon’s claim was: what really is the difference between the thing in itself and the way I perceive it? Maimon says that the thing in itself is not really a substance, not some object existing in the world, but rather the collection of connections, the collection of statements I make about the thing, constitutes within my consciousness a sense that there is a thing. But it is not really something separate from the collection of statements. The collection of statements about the thing—you might perhaps express this in a modern way: Quine, a modern twentieth-century philosopher, basically says somewhat similar things from other contexts. I’m not sure he knew Shlomo Maimon, but he arrives at roughly the same conclusion. He says that all human knowledge is basically built in the form of a network, a system of relations between objects, entities, or whatever. You can’t learn one object and then another and then another. All learning is like a neural network, if you know what that is, or something of that sort. Every bit of learning about one thing changes the entire overall picture; it has implications for all sorts of other things because there are reciprocal connections and influences and so on. Nothing can be defined locally—that’s his claim. Human knowledge has to expand as a whole package all at once. You can’t study one topic—that’s exactly what we always see. When you study one thing, you try to encompass an entire topic, an entire subject, right? There’s no such thing, because every understanding here depends on investigating that topic over there, but in order to investigate that topic over there you need to investigate yet another topic, and in the end it comes back to your original topic. And the whole business interlocks. You really can’t investigate one topic at a time; theoretically you have to investigate everything together and advance everything together. It’s clear that it works that way in practice, and it seems to me the world also looks like that. And what actually happens, says Shlomo Maimon, is that this whole network of connections exists within my consciousness, nowhere else. And the objects—what I call objects—are simply the nodes in the network. The links between the nodes—let’s try to imagine it as some sort of network, right? So we have a nodal point and lines leading from one nodal point to another. The points—the whole thing—is within my consciousness. The nodal points are the objects, what I call the objects, and the links between the nodes are the statements I make about the objects, or the relations between them, things I say about them. But all of this is really one single fabric. It isn’t two levels of existence as Kant described: the thing in itself existing in the world, and then the collection of its properties, the collection of things I say about it, existing within me. Rather, it is all one fabric; it is all perception; it all exists in consciousness. And the nodes of the network are the objects, and the—nodes and vertices in mathematics, in graph theory, that’s how it works. The links—or I don’t know what to call them—the links or the lines, the strands, right, maybe strands—those are the properties or the statements about things. All right?
[Speaker B] That’s what he solved? He said even the thing in itself is inside consciousness?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what he says. He says you can’t talk about the thing as outside consciousness; you have to bring it in too. But then the question is: what’s the difference between it and the collection of its properties? So he says yes indeed, it is really only two abstractions that our consciousness makes. In practice there is only one network, which is the thing and the statements, matter and form, all together—one single network. The nodes of the network are the thing, and the strands of the network are its form, or its properties, or its connections to other nodes. He has his confusions; idealism has different styles of idealism, but—
[Speaker B] These nodes— the question is to what extent they are things in themselves. Here you complicated the whole thing of things in themselves a bit.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The nodes you cannot grasp. To grasp a node is to know the strands that reach—
[Speaker B] —it, and then in fact you grasp only the strands; the nodes themselves you don’t.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that is exactly what Shlomo Maimon says. The paradox—what is the paradox? This description of the network, I think, is not taken from Maimon; this is my own way of putting it. I’m describing it as a network—that’s not Maimon—but I think that’s what he has in mind. He really says there are no nodes; the nodes are an abstraction. Where all the strands meet—that is what is called a node, and that is how our consciousness constitutes its concepts, its objects, to which it supposedly refers. But in fact it is a collection of statements; it is not the thing itself. And then, as you understand, we move over to Leibniz: there is nothing in the thing beyond the collection of its properties, because the meeting point of all the strands does not contain another point beyond the strands. The mathematical meeting point where all the strands meet—that is what I call an object, and that’s all. It is simply part of the strand itself, the last point of that specific strand itself; that is what I call the object, where it connects to all the other strands. It is not something essentially different from the strand; there really is no such thing. The collection of statements—the network is a nice metaphor, I hadn’t thought of that before—and the collection of statements is the thing itself. That’s basically it. No, I hadn’t understood this properly until now; I really do need to think it through again. Now what actually emerges from here? What emerges is—read the last sentence in section 24: “What includes the unity of the name, the judgment, and the inference, which is the goal of the new logic—the supreme logical unity.” And footnote 73 below: Shlomo Maimon, Essay on a New Logic, and so on. What is really going on here? If you remember, the name, the judgment, and the inference are the three things with which this section opened, right? We said: the concept, the judgment I make about it, and the inference—that is, the system of judgments where one follows from another. Right? That is the name, the judgment, and the inference. And you can see that in the network model we’ve just been discussing, it’s the same thing. The name is the thing itself. Yes, “name” divides into three—name, concept, and representation—three things that are the object being discussed, the subject of the judgment. Yes, the name has a name, it has a concept, it has a representation, never mind—but it is the object that is the subject of the judgment. The judgment is like a legal ruling, like in the Shulchan Arukh: you say a ruling about something; that something has such-and-such a rule—this is a judgment dealing with that subject, that concept. And the inference is the derivation of this judgment from other judgments, or of other judgments from this one—the relations between them. Right? When people speak about a judgment, what do they say it about?
[Speaker B] What do they say it about? If all this is just the layers of what—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is only a fictive construction of consciousness—that’s his claim, Shlomo Maimon’s. In reality there is no concept in itself. It is simply the form we choose in order to describe to one another the network that is in our head.
[Speaker B] But the network has to apply to the predicate—to what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the predicate is on the network—that’s exactly the point. You can’t say something about a concept. Here I’m bringing Quine too much into Shlomo Maimon. I’m not sure Shlomo Maimon would have liked this so much, but it seems to me it gives a good understanding. Quine talks about a network.
[Speaker B] We are talking about something; it’s not sentence against sentence—the sentence is about something.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That is the form, that is your way of conveying to someone else this network that you are experiencing in your head. My thought is that the strands are the judgment—but what is its subject?
[Speaker B] Its subject is the node.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So you begin with the node and then say something about it? No, it doesn’t start with the node, because there is no such thing as a node. It is a construction I create in order to have a syntactic structure for judgments—subject, predicate, sentence—so that I can pass information to you. What do we do? We break this network down into components: it has nodes, it has strands, it has a network, one can even talk that way. Otherwise what do you do? You can’t photograph the network in your head and transmit it to someone else.
[Speaker B] But they are photographing something. There has to be something that predicates something about something. There has to be a subject, something for it to be about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s its subject. What’s the problem?
[Speaker B] But who said that this subject has some counterpart in the world? Even if, say, the layer—the layer of what? The layer of something, of a subject, something it is about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the reflection creates a result from the sentences of the Torah. Fine. But as you perceive it, once there are already judgments, then from within them you can build, make a certain reconstruction, create nodes that will be as though the subjects of the judgments, build the judgments around the node, and in that way pass it on to someone else. But when I tell you, “the column that I’m saying right now is blue,” to speak about what, rather than to speak about the object that is blue?
[Speaker B] Not the object-node. The object is in the world; the web creates the language after there is already the sentence.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. But that sentence—you cannot formulate it as “the object is blue.” This network, when you grasp it as a network in an overall sense, is a wholly nonverbal perception. And when you try to translate it into verbal sentences, that is precisely why you have to break it down into nodes and strands and things like that. Your basic perception—and this connects with the dispute between Tosafot and Rashba that I think we mentioned—regarding the question whether thought is verbal thought or nonverbal thought. How does a person think? Is there a layer in his thinking that is nonverbal? And some tie that to a dispute between Tosafot and Rashba. What? Thought as speech, yes. Rashba explains there on page 15—Rashba explains there how two things are learned from “Hear, O Israel.” We’d need the Talmud here to recall it—the Talmud, tractate Berakhot. Right, right.
[Speaker B] Last time—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We asked this last summer—
[Speaker B] —or something like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We asked this two years ago, I think. I’m not sure you have to say this is specifically Rashba; there are several later authorities who understood him this way. The Chazon Ish quite clearly understood him this way.
[Speaker B] Thought as speech, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. Rashba claims that thought is nonverbal. It says here in the Talmud: “Rabbi Yose says: one who recites the Shema but does not make it audible to his ear has fulfilled his obligation. Rabbi Yose says: he has not fulfilled it.” The Talmud asks: what is Rabbi Yose’s reason? It is written: “Make your ears hear what your mouth utters.” “What your mouth utters”—therefore you have to make your ears hear it. If you did not make it heard, then you did not fulfill your obligation. And the first tanna holds: “Hear”—in any language that you hear. Meaning that it is permitted to say the Shema in any language; he learns that from the verse “Hear,” and therefore he does not need to make it audible to his ears. The Talmud asks: and from where does Rabbi Yose know that one may say it in any language?
[Speaker B] Rabbi Yose derives two things from “Hear.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rabbi Yose learns two things from “Hear.” Rashba asks here: how can you learn two things from one word? Unbelievable. There is no such thing. There has to be something within the word that tells you that same thing about the word. From the same word you cannot derive two things.
[Speaker B] “In any language that you hear”—you hear. Meaning, if you said that in any language you can hear, you don’t fulfill the requirement of hearing. The second derivation branches out of the first condition that follows from it. If I tell you that in any language you can hear, you do not fulfill hearing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, that’s how you understand Rashi? I didn’t read Rashi that way. You may be right.
[Speaker B] You may be right—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t read Rashi that way, I don’t know. No, it’s not related, it’s not… Rashba—it’s not related to… He has various interpretations of Rashba. Tosafot disagrees with Rashba. Rashba here really asks that question. So he says something very simple: if reciting the Shema did not need to be audible to one’s ear, then there could not be any law about which language it is said in. Because thoughts are not tied to language. Meaning, thought—inner thought—is not tied to a language. Now again, from here to conclude that thought is nonverbal—most of the later authorities do read Rashba that way. And Rashash here on the spot, I think, raises an objection from Tosafot in tractate Shabbat on page 49, where Tosafot there discusses thought in the bathroom, I think, or no… thought on the Sabbath about mundane matters. Tosafot there says that one can think in a foreign language, I think. In Tosafot—that one can think in a language. So you see that one can think in a language. So from the objection itself you already understand that Rashba is saying maybe not—that one cannot think in a language.
[Speaker B] In “Hear, O Israel,” thought is nonverbal.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Because you are thinking the content that you think—thinking the content in inner thought. Now, again, you can approach this in many ways; I won’t get into it now. Rashba is arguing exactly that. He argues that if there is a law to say it in a language, that is a sign that this is not mere thought, because if it were mere thought there could not be a law requiring it to be in a language. And of course one can say this in two ways—more than two ways—and I won’t get into that now. This understanding of Rashba is not forced, but there are several later authorities who understood him this way and ask from Tosafot, because Tosafot says not like that—that thought is verbal. So Rashba claims that thought is nonverbal, because with regard to thought there cannot be laws about which language it is in. Why? Because it is nonverbal—so how could that be? Therefore the word “therefore”—I’m trying to soften it a little. Obviously Rashba understands that I can run words through my head. But when they tell you that you don’t have to speak, then obviously in thought too you don’t have to do that. But there is some even deeper level that is nonverbal—to understand what you are saying even in your head. And that is what is required of you. If they tell you it is enough to think it, then basically only that is required of you. Because if language and voice were required, then you would have had to speak. What follows from Rashba is at least that there is in thought a nonverbal layer. To say that all thought is nonverbal is another question, and I don’t think that is true. At the base, when a person thinks a thought—well, never mind. In any case, why did we arrive at this? Precisely because of the network model here. What are we saying? We are saying that our insight, our intuitions, are not formulated in language. So I can grasp the whole network as it is, globally—not speak about this node and that node. I have some overall store of knowledge; everything exists in my head in some primordial way. In a certain sense that is the thing in itself—which is exactly the reverse. The thing in itself is what is within me, and the thing as it is is exactly what I express. According to Maimon it comes out reversed. But it is some kind of primordial something that you don’t know how to carry. When you try to say it, to translate it into words in order to convey it to someone else, you have to create some kind of construction of concepts about which judgments are made, and they are a tool of communication between people. Thought, as we said according to Rashba, is nonverbal. So it is not subject to the need for a predicate, a subject; you don’t have to create concepts for yourself around which the judgment revolves. But if you want to convey it to someone else, then you are subject to the rules of speech. Speech developed that way—at least among human beings it is necessary, but that’s how it developed—there is a subject and a predicate and a thing being spoken about and so on. So what do you do? You make an abstraction, take that node and call it by a name. And that is the concept. Even though there really is no such thing—it is just a meeting of strands.
[Speaker B] And within himself, a person does not think that way?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A person does not grasp things that way at their deepest inner level. As we said with Rashba, it is exactly the same thing. It is really Rashba. The deepest inner level of thought is like that. Now, true, one can also think verbally. Before I say the sentence to you, I can also think it. But even the thought of the sentence is not my most basic understanding of the world. My most basic understanding of the world is some global network. Which, by the way, is how the brain works. The brain works that way according to all modern research; the brain works that way even biologically. It is neural networks; it is global understanding, not local understanding. That is accepted by almost everyone. Today they even build computer programs that way, globally. Nothing changes locally. You’ll see it, you’ll understand what I mean: a computer program that is written and functions and is built in a completely—really not at all—
[Speaker B] A baby who sees things is on that level. Obviously he grasps things before I start telling him “this is blue.” Otherwise he couldn’t compare two things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that means he has a perception before you can formulate judgments about it and things like that.
[Speaker B] You’re talking in blue and green, but he has already grasped it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And obviously you cannot convey to a baby something fundamentally new to him. That is completely clear. At least to me that is completely clear. Fine, and Chomsky talked about this a bit—the famous linguist. There was an article about him a week ago, a well-known antisemite. He’s a Jew. He says he is a Jewish antisemite, like everyone. In any case, he’s the son of Israeli parents who emigrated. Noam—
[Speaker B] Chomsky.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And he is the greatest linguist alive and perhaps ever.
[Speaker B] A somewhat foolish man, he—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A smart Jew but terribly antisemitic; apparently intolerable. In any case, that is basically the claim. In such a picture there is a unity of the name, the judgment, and the inference. This whole background was really for the sake of that point, but it also comes to expression in the next paragraph, which is also connected to the matter. The name, the judgment, and the inference. The name is the concept, the subject around which the judgment revolves—the node. The judgment is the line, but it’s the same thing, because the concept is the collection of lines that arrive at it—it’s the same thing. And the inference is the mode of thought or how I attain it; that too is basically the same thing, because everything exists inside my consciousness. Meaning, these are all really parts of my consciousness, and everything else is only separations. What Maimonides would call—and this is one of Maimonides’ prominent influences on Shlomo Maimon—the unity of the intellect, the intellection, and the intelligible. Now Shlomo Maimon argues that in the infinite intellect, the infinite intellect really does have this unity in a perfect way. But for a human being, who has a finite intellect, this unity is not perfect, and therefore there is formed for him some image of a thing in itself. There is no such thing as a thing in itself. There is no distinction between matter and form—this is a revolutionary perception. There is no distinction between matter and form. What is matter? Matter is all the forms that we have not yet grasped, according to Maimon. And the infinite intellect, which grasps the whole network at once—has no observation problems and no memory problems and nothing—can grasp the whole network at once. So for it there is no matter and form; it is all form, it is all one thing, it is form, a form-pattern. Matter and form—the whole distinction does not exist. Everything is present to it at once because the whole network sits before it at once. That is also why, according to Maimon, we have trouble grasping what he is saying. I believe that this would be exactly his explanation of why we find it hard to understand him. Because we are imprisoned in this conception of built-up judgments. After all, we think that way too, not only speak that way. As you asked earlier about “I”—when I think it, I have in my head first of all a subject that I’m talking about, that I’m thinking about. That’s true. Why is that true? It is an illusion because my intellect is finite. Because there are parts in the form, certain properties of the thing, that I haven’t yet grasped. So for me they make up the thing in itself, which is supposedly inaccessible to me. I don’t yet know that part. And what I do know is only the parts of the form that I have grasped. Therefore the distinction between matter and form is something that gradually disappears as I advance in knowledge, and in fact as I rise upward toward the infinite intellect. That is Maimon’s claim. Another few lectures and I’ll start believing this too. It’s suddenly starting to look obvious to me, which is beginning to worry me. Yes, that’s it. It suddenly starts to seem so obvious to me that maybe it’s even true. I disagreed with it so strongly, but—well. By the way, if you want to clarify something, the best way is first to take someone and try to defend the idea with which you disagree—against yourself. Really try, seriously, to persuade yourself why that idea is correct. Then switch hats and take the other side. And then think what you really think. It really gives a different picture of things. What? Yes, right. So that is what he says: “What includes the unity of the name, the judgment, and the inference is the goal of the new logic, the supreme logical unity.” Where are we with the clock? Quarter to eight. I suggest, if there’s no objection, maybe we should have another meeting at the beginning of next week, because I would actually be happy to finish up to section 27. At least that’s some kind of point from which Kant begins. With him, Kant comes after Maimon and not before. Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six… We’ve now finished 24. That was the last sentence of 24, which basically serves as an introduction to what will come next.
[Speaker B] What does he say there? What? What? He says that basically everything here is one thing for him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “What includes the unity of the name, the judgment, and the inference is the goal of the new logic.” The New Logic is the name of Maimon’s book. We saw that earlier in the footnote too, Essay on a New Logic.
[Speaker B] And that is the supreme logical unity. What? What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The supreme logical unity.
[Speaker B] To accept it or not to accept it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think he accepts it. That’s what we’ll see in the next sections. But it needs some refinement, and the truth is it wouldn’t hurt me to think about it for another couple of days before I tell you the continuation. Because it seems to me that he accepts it on the principled level in the infinite intellect, as we said earlier. But for us, we still have to think in terms of matter and form and the thing in itself and the thing as it is perceived by us. But it is true in this sense—not like Kant, where we somehow have no way of crossing that barrier. Here we can take bigger and bigger bites out of the matter and expand our understanding of the form—in fact, grasp more and more of a broader and broader totality of the network. What? Then it becomes… and then there will no longer be a thing in itself. And the truth is that if you think about it philosophically, then obviously from the standpoint of the Holy One, blessed be He, there are no things that are “in themselves,” because everything is Him. So you understand this already in the language of medieval philosophy; you’re already familiar with it. I’m presenting it here in the language of Kant and the post-Kantians, but you already know it in the language of the medieval philosophers. After all, in the world of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the world of the Infinite, there is nothing outside the Infinite, right? So you understand that there is no such thing as what is called the thing in itself; everything exists within Him, right? That is the unity of the intellect, the intellection, and the intelligible. Everything is Him. Only from our point of view, as separate beings, there is this kind of duality—matter by itself, the thing in itself, and what is perceived. So in truth, from the philosophical aspect of things, we already know this. I just presented it now from the epistemological, cognitive aspect—but it is the same principle itself. And basically what all of us—you yourselves surely say this all the time. There’s no need to panic about it so much; in divinity this is certainly so.
[Speaker B] So now, what is he really coming to say in Kant?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but that is exactly the point. If so in Kant, but not so for us, then it no longer sounds like much. And that is basically more or less what we are always talking about—
[Speaker B] —that everything is in me, everything is in me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, everything is in me and outside there is nothing.
[Speaker B] Meaning—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that what is found within me has a divine point. If I fully reveal it and fully cleave to the divine and rise upward—in my terms, not Maimon's, right, or the Nazir's—then yes, I’ll reach a state where the whole network is inside me, because I’ll essentially become, כביכול, part of the divine; I’ve cleaved to it. Understand? They’re saying the same thing here—you can see the different aspects. These are basically things we do know, just presented from a slightly different angle.