Mind and Emotion, Lesson 6

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, who is this Don Yehuda Abrabanel? There’s a whole introduction there; it’s very interesting. He was apparently the son of Don Yitzhak Abrabanel, and there were claims that he converted to Christianity. Now, it’s not clear—there are debates there, whether he did convert or didn’t convert, I don’t know exactly, but there are some such claims. I think the conclusion in that edition was that it isn’t true. I think that was in the introduction there, but I’m not sure exactly. In short, there was that issue, but the book was accepted as a book all the same. It’s a philosophical book, dialogues on love, some kind of dialogue between a man and a woman, between Philo and Naamah, I think, philosophy and all that—doesn’t matter. In short, that’s one book. And another book: there’s some Spanish philosopher named José Ortega y Gasset, that’s his name, with Five Essays on Love. That’s what he wrote. He was some sort of philosopher-journalist type; actually in Latin culture there are quite a lot of those. Later on I happened to meet a few—very interesting types, intellectuals, but also journalistic, and all sorts of things, also a poet and also a philosopher and all kinds of things. There are such people; very interesting types. So he too wrote about this issue, and both of them basically talk about the difference between love and desire. And the claim there is: what’s the difference between loving someone and desiring someone, a man or a woman, okay? So they say that in love, the one at the center is the other person, and in desire, the one at the center is me. So basically desire is the wish to bring her to me, so that she will belong to me, whereas love is some kind of wish to belong to her, or to care for her, or whatever—in other words, she is the focus, the beloved is the focus, not the lover. They call it centrifugal and centripetal. The question is whether it’s directed toward the center or from the center outward. Of course, the assumption is always that I’m the center, so the only question is whether it goes outward or inward, but the metaphors here are interesting. In any case, that’s what they’re talking about. There’s a well-known little insight—I also don’t know who the source is—after all, it says about our forefather Jacob: ויהיו בעיניו כימים אחדים באהבתו אותה (“they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her”). So the famous question is: if he loved her so much and couldn’t wait, then usually the opposite is true—even if he has to wait a day or two, it feels like years. And the verse describes the opposite: he had to wait seven years, and to him they seemed like a few days, no problem at all. So what is that? How does that work? How does that fit the psychological phenomena we know? So the answer is that he loved Rachel and not himself. And when a person loves himself—or if I translate it into the previous language, if the person desires Rachel—then he can’t wait until he gets her. Because he needs to get her; he wants to take possession of something, he can’t wait. If he has to wait one day, it feels like years. But if he loves Rachel, then fine, he’ll invest seven years, as long as in the end what should happen will happen; he’s doing it for her. So he has no

[Speaker E] problem; to him they seemed like a few days.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A nice little insight. I’m not sure how true it is, but it’s a nice one.

[Speaker E] What? It’s Rabbi Hutner; the Rabbi brought it in some article.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think it’s Rabbi Hutner.

[Speaker E] I’ll find it for you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Really? That’s the first time I’ve heard that. I heard it in the name of “the righteous man from Ra’anana”—I don’t know who the righteous man from Ra’anana is, but someone once told me this in his name. I don’t know, I don’t know who the source for this idea is; I don’t think it’s Rabbi Hutner.

[Speaker E] I’ll bring it to you—you wrote it. Okay, that’s actually where I read it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The source interests me.

[Speaker F] Maybe—

[Speaker E] You’re the source, and Rabbi Hutner took it from you. Could be. Depends exactly from where.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he took it from Rabbi—

[Speaker E] Hutner, that’s centrifugal.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The righteous man from Ra’anana took it from Hutner, and Rabbi Hutner took it from me, so fine. Anyway, I also think this matter really is… I think that when you look at this distinction more deeply, the whole romantic description of Hollywood love—Cupid—even that starts in Greek mythology. Cupid shoots an arrow and love awakens. What that really means is that it’s desire; it’s desire, not love, that thing. Because this awakening is basically some desire to appropriate her to myself as well, or to control her, or to be… I think I mentioned this a bit. There’s a book on Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis, three essays edited by Yehuda Regavim, a faithful Jew—I think he has already passed away—in which one of the essays is by Erich Fromm, one by some Mexican philosopher, and one by a Japanese man named Suzuki, who is apparently unrelated to the cars—though maybe yes, I don’t know—but I know him because I’ve seen other things by him; he deals with transmitting Zen thought to the West. He’s well-versed in Western philosophy and knows how to describe Zen philosophy in a way a Western ear can hear. And there at the beginning of the essay, to explain the difference between Western and Eastern thought, he brings two poems, one by Tennyson I think, and the second some poem by some Zen sage, some Zen koan poem. It was about Western philosophy and Zen philosophy, and there at the beginning of the essay, in order to explain the difference between Western and Eastern thought, he brings two poems, one by Tennyson I think, and the second some poem by some Zen sage, whatever it was, some kind of ancient Zen poem, a koan, I think from the seventh century or something like that. Tennyson says, “Oh flower in the wall, would that you were mine and I could take possession of you and you would be entirely within me,” something like that—I don’t remember the exact words now; I just remembered this now—as if it’s a kind of Western “subdue it and conquer it” outlook, right? In other words, your attitude toward it is the desire to control it, to appropriate it too. And the Zen man says, “Oh flower in the wall, how beautiful it is to see you. Of course I won’t touch you, and you’ll remain there growing on your own, and I’ll enjoy you and all of us will enjoy you,” a kind of opposite outlook. I think that comparison is very beautiful, just beautiful. I think I once talked about this in connection with Tu Bishvat. In any case, it’s exactly the same thing. Tennyson describes desire, and that Zen sage—Guang Zhou, I don’t know what his name was, something like that—describes love. And the question is whether you are at the center or the other object is at the center.

[Speaker C] Wait, but couldn’t it be that I’m still at the center, but I enjoy looking at something? I mean, it doesn’t seem to me that it necessarily follows…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, there was some kind of point there—you can see some issue there, yes. You can say that you simply want to preserve the love, not take it, because if you take it then how will you enjoy it afterward? It always remains like with eco-ethics, you know—there are people who advocate ecology on ethical grounds. The usual justification for ecology is not to destroy our world because in the end we’ll suffer. And eco-ethics says no, we owe something to the planet. Why are we the center? In other words, don’t harm plants, animals, whatever, the ozone, wherever—because you owe something to the planet. In other words, it’s… But I think the feeling was—I don’t remember the poem right now, it just came back to me now—but the feeling was yes, that I grant some kind of… and that’s certainly true of Zen too. The way of looking at anything is that it stands for itself; nothing here serves me. It’s not that I’m the center—on the contrary, I’m somehow absorbed into the space around me, I’m not some subject standing on its own. So there too I think the Cupid-Hollywood outlook is really connected more to desire than to love. And desire is the kind of thing that really is pure emotion—that is, some need or urge awakens in me, and from there I’m driven by that emotion that awakens in me. By contrast, I think love, in certain respects—that’s why people often say that love has to be cultivated—in other words, it’s something you have to work on, something that can develop over time, even though it may be less stormy perhaps; the storm subsides a bit over time. But in a certain sense that doesn’t necessarily reflect a decline in love; love can be deeper over time even if it’s less stormy, because here it really requires a kind of work that builds it. So that’s exactly the difference between simple emotion that bursts out on its own, or some instinct, and therefore it also makes no sense to command it—we talked about that, that it makes no sense to command something like that—because it’s not something I do, it’s something that happens to me, like with Cupid: he shoots an arrow at me and it happens to me. In other words, it’s not something I do. Whereas in love, it’s the result of some process, some work of mine, which in the end may also create an emotional state, but that’s only the tip of the process; it’s not what I start from, it’s what I end with. And really, once—I think I may once have talked about this a bit—there’s a difference: most things we say about some object are about its properties, but there are certain things we can say about its very essence, that is, about it itself, not about its properties—for example, that it exists. We talked about this in the context of the ontological proof, when we discussed proofs for the existence of God, I don’t remember how many years ago that was. The claim there was that saying that something exists is not a property of the thing, that it exists, but rather some statement about it itself. Its properties are that it is such-and-such—triangular, square, red, kind-hearted, tall, short, whatever; those are all properties. But to say that it exists is to say something about it itself, not about its properties. Or to say that it is one—maybe that too, I’d have to think a bit—that it is one and not two, that too in a certain sense is not a property but a statement about the thing. There is one thing here and not two things; that’s not a property of the thing but a question of whether this is it or whether these are they. So once, in some class where I was speaking about this, a woman said she thought that love too is directed toward the thing and not toward its properties. It’s an interesting comment, because on the face of it that isn’t true. I mean, you love someone, a man or a woman, because of one property or another that you love. But actually that’s not precise, it seems to me. Because in a place where, say, some connection can arise between two people—spouses or just two people—there can be loves of various kinds. And the properties change over time, or the person undergoes one change or another, and the connection can remain. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily depend on the properties, in the sense that the Mishnah says: כל אהבה שהיא תלויה בדבר בטל דבר בטלה אהבה, אהבה שאינה תלויה בדבר בטל דבר לא בטלה אהבה (“Any love that depends on a thing—when the thing ceases, the love ceases; but love that does not depend on a thing—when the thing ceases, the love does not cease”). In a certain sense, true love is love that does not depend on a thing, where “thing” can also mean an interest. But this too is a kind of interest: love of properties is also some kind of interest, because basically you love him because he is such-and-such, not that you love him, period. Now, the commandments in Jewish law concerning emotion are all love that depends on a thing. We are commanded to love a love that depends on a thing. To love the convert because he is a convert, to love the Jew because he is a Jew—that depends on a thing in that sense. By contrast, love of the ordinary type, in everyday life, is love that does not depend on a thing. In other words, I love the person not because of what he is; I simply love him. True, I encounter him through his properties and through how I perceive him, but that is only the way I encounter him. Ultimately, when I love, I love him himself, not the properties. The properties are only the medium through which this whole thing is formed.

[Speaker G] Is there a self without properties? I mean, is there something that, if you remove all a person’s properties, something still remains?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the principled level, yes. I just don’t know how you remove properties. But in principle, yes. The same person—say if somehow you managed to change all his properties, if he eats he’ll get fatter, if he gets tanned he’ll get darker, and all the cells in his body will be replaced—after enough years that happens; nothing remains of the previous person—he’s still the same person. That’s the accepted view; the ship of Theseus, there’s that thing. But I’m talking about psychological properties. Psychological properties too, in principle—change his… after all, I even think you can do this, through manipulations of the brain.

[Speaker E] If you change all his properties, I don’t know.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not sure. Not sure at all. It’s someone completely different.

[Speaker E] Not sure at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Think about a child.

[Speaker H] People change; people change over the course of life.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. No, say even your own son or daughter. Suppose they now, in some metamorphic way, change completely. In other words, none of the original properties remain. There it’s obviously not because of the properties, after all. You don’t love them because of their properties, so there it’s clear that that’s not true. You love them because he is your son. Now he remains your son even if all his properties change. Biologically he’s your son.

[Speaker E] But that changes my feeling.

[Speaker C] I—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying, you change the feeling—

[Speaker E] of the child, there’s an effect—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m saying that this is—

[Speaker E] a decisive effect if it’s exactly as you describe, completely.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This isn’t a binary inquiry—it’s not either in the properties or in… I’m only saying that there are elements here, or sometimes there are additional elements here in a more minor way, that don’t depend specifically on the properties. Meaning, it’s possible that they won’t change even though the properties change. Fine. So that too is an interesting claim, because then it really says that in a certain sense the properties are what you encounter; that just happens to you. But love, as I said earlier, may really be something that requires a kind of work. So the work is done through the properties, but ultimately a state is created here that perhaps does not depend on the properties. And that’s the more cognitive sort of work, like love of God: to do the truth because it is truth. Remember? I brought that Maimonides last class.

[Speaker E] If someone were told that his child is not really his child after forty years of raising him—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s an interesting experiment, but I don’t know. I don’t know what would happen there. I believe there would be cases where yes and cases where no. Why?

[Speaker E] Because it’s the properties—it’s how you became attached to what you became attached to.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but sometimes not. Sometimes it would be significant.

[Speaker E] That’s why I’m saying: and then they reveal to you that it’s not your son.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How many people—why children? We talked about this too once—why do children look for their biological parents? They were given up for adoption at one month old, they never knew them, don’t know who they are, they didn’t invest a minute in them, and they look for them—and this can cause crises. There are books and films about it. The crises they go through when they look for them, and how important it is to them to find

[Speaker F] them—let’s say without remaining with the adoptive parents.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, fine, but why is it important to them to find them? Just out of curiosity? It’s not only curiosity. There is some kind of bond simply from the fact that you are his descendant. Now fine, in the end there may also be—I’m not belittling the bond created with the adoptive parents—I’m only saying it’s not true that it’s only the properties or only the encounter. There is something that, through the encounter, reflects something that is in the nature of the thing itself. There is such a thing. Okay, in any case, these are just a few comments on love and awe, which we discussed in previous times. Maybe I’ll say a few more aspects and then I’ll try to get to something else too. There’s also the matter of gratitude; I once talked about that too. There too the verse says: הלה’ תגמלו זאת עם נבל ולא חכם הלוא הוא אביך קנך הוא עשך ויכננך (“Is this how you repay the Lord, a vile and unwise people? Is He not your Father, your Creator? He made you and established you”). So the verse there gives two grounds for gratitude.

[Speaker I] At the end of last class—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah yes, did I talk about that? So I already got to that.

[Speaker I] No, but for me what—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] matters is only this distinction, yes, just this distinction. I don’t want to get into the whole… If you want, I can send it; it’s also on the website, you can look there. Another point is providence—that is, faith and trust. That’s what I wrote literally today in today’s column: faith and trust. There’s some kind of thesis here—I don’t know, again, what its earliest source is—but people keep pulling it out all the time. In any case, of course it is someone’s reasoning, so it doesn’t really matter what its source is. It’s the kind of reasoning one can accept or not accept: that trust depends on your state of consciousness. In other words, the Holy One, blessed be He, will watch over you if you truly trust in Him. And if you are not among those who truly trust in Him, then no. In other words, God’s providence over you is a function of the question of how much you trust in Him. Now the question is: what counts as “how much you trust in Him”? And here you can often see a distinction between the question of how much you feel that trust or experience that trust, and not the philosophical question of how much you really think that the Holy One, blessed be He, does everything. That’s a different issue. It can be that on the philosophical level a person has reached the conclusion that the Holy One, blessed be He, does everything in the world, everything is in His hands, there is none besides Him, everything is for the good—but in life he does not live that way. He doesn’t live that way. Meaning, it isn’t internalized in him at the simple, immediate emotional level. Even though if you ask him truly, that is what he thinks. He’ll tell you yes, everything depends on the Holy One, blessed be He—but there are those who will say, fine, but that’s not authentic; he doesn’t really think that way, which is why he goes to a doctor. Right, so he doesn’t really think… There are those who would say: then he doesn’t really think that way. It isn’t true that there is such a disconnect. Maybe—I don’t know—right now I’m also somewhat inclined to think that way, but there are those who want to claim: no, that’s weakness. In other words, the person really does believe this, he trusts in the Holy One, blessed be He, but he is weak. And since that’s so, this too becomes self-reinforcing, so the Holy One, blessed be He, also doesn’t watch over him, because if he doesn’t really believe in Him or doesn’t really trust in Him, then the Holy One, blessed be He, also conducts Himself toward him כמים הפנים לפנים (“as face answers to face in water”), yes, God deals with him accordingly. And then what comes out of this is that God’s relation to a person depends on some emotional dimension, not on his intellectual conception, not on his philosophical conception. Right.

[Speaker C] What? Not only—not necessarily, because it doesn’t always add in the intellectual conception,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it doesn’t depend only on the intellectual conception; the emotional factor also plays a role. It’s enough for me that it does too. Meaning, the emotional factor has significance. Okay. And then that basically means—suppose I… I never agree with this view; it just seems illogical to me. It seems illogical to me because, really, if I truly believe that everything comes from Him, then that’s a factual question: either everything really comes from Him, in which case everything comes from Him, or not everything comes from Him, in which case not everything comes from Him. Now what does it mean to say that if I don’t believe it, then not everything comes from Him? If not everything comes from Him, then I really… then if I experience it that way, that’s a sign that I also ought to believe it, because that really is the true state of affairs. It’s not just that this is how I experience it; it really is the true state of affairs, because for someone who experiences it, that really is his state of affairs. So how can there be a dissonance between what I believe and what I experience? By definition, what I experience determines reality; so accordingly, that’s also what I should believe. The moment you speak about dissonance, you’re saying: no, the truth is that everything is in His hands. The fact that you experience it differently—that’s not good, so that’s… weakness, or I don’t know exactly what. Fine. And therefore what? So now not everything is in His hands? If in practice everything is in His hands, then everything is in His hands. What difference does it make what I experience? That’s reality. And if I really think—there are some who want to say even more than that—if you don’t feel that everything is in His hands, then you’re not allowed to trust; meaning, then you have to make an effort. That’s how they reconcile this Nachmanides, who says that in essence someone who truly trusts does not need to do anything, no effort whatsoever.

[Speaker C] “Not do anything” meaning he says not to go to a doctor, not to do anything across the board.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I don’t know, I’m not familiar with it because I haven’t read it; that’s not the kind of thing I read. But never mind, that’s what people say in the name of Nachmanides.

[Speaker C] Not do anything in the sense of sitting at home all day?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t Nachmanides, so I’m saying something else now, I’m saying. Never mind, Yankele said… no, I don’t know what he said.

[Speaker C] I didn’t think that was the ideal.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m talking about that view. There isn’t such a view? I just want to examine it—not because… on the principled level, that’s what lies behind it. Don’t go to a doctor is the same as don’t go to work—what’s the difference?

[Speaker C] No, the assumption is that if you got sick, that’s a punishment, so therefore you need a warning sign; the fact that you need to go…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not because if you got sick it’s a punishment, but because healing is in any case in His hands; making an effort is only an obligation of effort. So if you trust in Him, then that obligation of effort no longer applies to you, and in any case either He will heal you or He won’t heal you, but it doesn’t depend on whether you go to a doctor. I’m talking about that conception. Okay, so again, I’m saying, I don’t know where this Nachmanides is, so it’s not… but I’m talking about this conception, which is accepted; a lot of people quote it, in any case. Okay. So I bring it only to illustrate the point; it doesn’t matter all that much to me who said exactly what. So there too, I say again, this distinction is a very problematic distinction, even on the philosophical level. Meaning, aside from the fact that it sees emotion as a factor that has influence—which in my view is itself not so reasonable—but beyond that I think there’s some problematic flaw inside it. Because if I truly believe intellectually that everything is in His hands, then the fact that I don’t experience it that way—I’ll overcome that and still do nothing, because the truth is that really nothing needs to be done. So what difference does it make that I don’t experience it that way? Unless what you’ll say is that if I experience it otherwise, then that really means it isn’t true. Fine, but if it really isn’t true, then my intellect too now has to be enlisted for that: maybe I should believe that on the theoretical level, if I also experienced it, then everything would be in His hands. But practically, since I don’t experience it that way, I also need to understand intellectually that no, not everything is placed in His hands. Okay? Therefore this very dissonance here between emotion and intellect seems a bit problematic to me. And again, I think the root of the problem is that people see emotion as something that has some significance of its own, and not merely as an expression of some inner work that I do. It may be that the expression of the fact that I’m really working and wholeheartedly trusting in Him is that I have the feeling of trust. So I understand that—in that case emotion is only an indication. What you really need to arrive at is belief, which is an intellectual conception of trust, and the emotion is an expression of that. That I understand. But someone who sees emotion as a value in itself, as a factor standing on its own and not as an expression of what you believe—that again is something I don’t really accept.

[Speaker C] So the very claim that there is—let’s leave trust aside for a moment—suppose I say that if there is belief X, some conception regarding divine providence, it doesn’t matter right now which variation out of all the existing conceptions, and that is the correct conception, then a person is required both to believe it, to think it’s true, and also to feel that this is how the world behaves. Now, if he only thinks it’s true but doesn’t feel that the world really behaves that way, then he is at an incomplete level; he hasn’t fulfilled the full demand made of a person. Okay, does that in itself bother the Rabbi, or…?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It bothers me too, because I don’t think there should be a demand directed at emotion; the demand should be about what I think, not what I feel. Unless you claim that the fact that I don’t feel it is an indication that I don’t fully think it.

[Speaker C] But there are commandments—I mean, there are commandments about love—so what is the Rabbi saying? No, I claim there aren’t.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Because love—the emotion in the end—is an indication that you’ve done your intellectual work. Ultimately, what is required is that you do the work, because that’s in your hands. The emotion, the goal, is only an indication that you really did what you’re supposed to do. And again, that’s a line of reasoning that takes us back to the previous lectures; never mind. I just want to have time for one more…

[Speaker D] One more issue.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The last point is really the topic of faith. This is the most basic topic; maybe I should have started with it, but I’m ending with it because I think it will summarize the topic well for us. What is faith in the Holy One, blessed be He? People connect this to trust as well, but I think we can ask it regarding faith too. There are many people who tie faith to a kind of emotion or experience. And I think faith is a philosophical matter—meaning, what you know, what you think. If you think—the claim that there is a God is a factual claim. It is not a report about a psychological state, that inside me there is some religious experience. Okay? It’s a factual claim: there simply is a God. “I believe in God,” for me, is a factual claim. “I believe in God” means: there is a God. What?

[Speaker B] Even if you don’t understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, don’t understand?

[Speaker B] You can’t explain it to yourself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What—how I arrived at it? Fine, I don’t know, maybe not. Never mind. But maybe I also can’t explain to myself why I think there’s a watch here when I see one. But I trust that there’s a watch here; I’m really making a claim about the world. There’s a watch here. I’m not reporting to you on my inner psychological state, that I now have a watch-experience inside me. I’m saying there is a watch. Meaning, that’s a claim about reality; it’s a factual claim. So when I say that I believe in God, it’s like the claim “there is a watch.” There is a God—that’s the claim. Many people say the sentence “I believe in God”—or at least that’s how they interpret the sentence; I’m not sure that’s actually what they mean, by the way—but many people interpret the statement “there is a God,” even believing people by the way. People who don’t believe, naturally, interpret it that way, but believing people too mean to say: I have religious experiences inside me, some encounter with the Holy One, blessed be He. I’m not committing myself to there being some factual claim about the world, that there is such a thing in the world. But I am a religious person, I am a religious person in the sense that I have a religious soul. Yes, I undergo religious experiences; I have some kind of… I live out of an encounter with the Holy One, blessed be He, without needing to address the question of whether there really is such a thing or whether that’s just how I’m built, or just the feeling inside me. And here again, this is perhaps the most fundamental point. Because here, in my opinion, to grasp faith as a report about a psychological state is essentially to be an atheist. But I’m a special kind of atheist—an atheist built in such a way that he has religious experiences inside, religious feelings, an atheist with a religious soul. Okay, there are many such people. Einstein was one, for example. People always say that Einstein believed in God; the God he believed in was nature itself. He believed in something kind of pantheistic; he didn’t really believe in some—at least according to how he formulated it. There are philosophical problems with this too; we once talked about pantheism. But at least as he formulates it, it’s not really faith in God but religious feelings when you stand before nature. There are many artists who report religious feelings when they engage in art; it gives them some kind of feeling, a sort of religious experience. A kind of… sometimes you even hear this in the way people speak about art, some sort of attitude of holiness toward that field. I never understood it, but that’s what you hear from people. And factually, if you ask them, “Is there or isn’t there a God? What do you think about reality itself?”—not, “What do you mean to say?”—then: “No, of course not,” or at least, “I have no idea; I didn’t mean to say anything about the factual issue.” What I’m describing to you is some psychological state, a report of a psychological state. So for me, such a person doesn’t count for a prayer quorum; in other words, he’s an atheist. Meaning, he’s praying to his own feelings. What does that have to do with anything? They call it God, and he builds for himself a whole fantasy together with the entire religious system, something that can also be experienced by someone who stands before a factually existing God. So what? That’s a psychological simulation. It’s like the figures Nash saw in front of him—they weren’t human beings, in A Beautiful Mind there. Meaning, the fact that you imitate the process of faith doesn’t yet mean that you believe. It’s some kind of simulation of the process of faith, but the main thing is missing; that is, the addressee of the faith, the one in whom you believe, isn’t there. Therefore, for example, when they conduct surveys about how many people believe in God, from time to time such surveys are published and you discover fairly high numbers. That’s often pretty surprising to see; at least once it surprised me, because I was sure the whole world was atheistic. I saw the world—I don’t know—whoever doesn’t believe, doesn’t believe. I wasn’t aware of all the feelings that accompany very many people of all sorts. But truly, I wonder to what extent—or what percentage—of those who report that they believe in God, believe in God in the sense of a factual claim, and how many are merely reporting religious feelings but don’t really believe in God in the ordinary sense. And by the way, there are many such people who, if you ask them—if you present them with the dilemma and ask what they mean, this or that—they’ll say, “No, I mean a religious feeling.” And the truth is, that’s not correct; he’s not interpreting himself correctly. Because very often the philosophical difficulty—without knowing where you know it from, what you said earlier, Meir—meaning, without knowing where your faith comes from, you still believe. And then you ask yourself, “Wait a second, but you don’t know where this comes from; there’s no basis.” Ah, right—so then it’s probably just a religious feeling. You give yourself an interpretation, you make a rationalization for your feelings: ah yes, it’s just feelings inside me; I’m not committing myself to there really being something, because there’s no seeing, I haven’t seen Him.

[Speaker C] And that is exactly the claim of someone who has a religious feeling—unless it’s really something unrelated, that it’s really just admiration and not faith at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying that very often the claim of someone who has a religious feeling is: “I believe in God.” He says the sentence “I believe in God,” “I’m a religious person,” there are all sorts of such expressions. Then you ask him, “Tell me, what do you mean? Do you mean that you have a religious soul, or that you think there factually is a God?” Then he thinks—and I’ve already met people like this—and says, “No, no, I’m talking about a religious feeling, not about a claim concerning reality.” Now, with such a person I don’t always believe him. I don’t believe him—not because he’s lying, of course, but because he isn’t interpreting himself correctly. Very often, when you see that there is a conception inside you, you say that you believe in God, that there is a God; you behave accordingly, you go to synagogue, you observe various commandments. Then you examine yourself rationally and say, “Wait, but there’s no basis for this, because science and all that, and you can’t see it, and you have no proofs, because faith is beyond reason,” and all sorts of nonsense like that. So in the end you conclude that it must really be a religious feeling. And so after you rationalize for yourself, after you analyze what’s going on inside you, you say, “No, I only mean a religious feeling.” But in practice that’s not true. It’s simply an incorrect rationalization that you’re making to yourself. You really do think that He exists; it’s just that the rationalization you make—since you think there’s no real basis for it, that it isn’t rational—leads you to say, “Okay, okay, it’s just a religious feeling.” And that is an incorrect interpretation of yourself. Because again, this connects to the same thing that has accompanied us throughout the last few lectures: emotion can sometimes express or be the result of an intellectual conception. Meaning, as with what I said about love, hatred, and all these things—these are the result of intellectual work. In the end, that work comes to expression as an emotion. Okay, the emotion is an expression of the fact that you really grasped something, did some kind of work, or thought something through, or arrived at some conclusion or something like that, and the emotion expresses it. Okay. Here too, very often you put your finger on the external expression, on the emotion, but that emotion expresses the fact that you sincerely and genuinely believe that there is a God. Only what? You don’t know how to provide a justification for it, and then you say, “Wait, I’m not an irrational person. If there’s no justification, why make claims about the world?” Therefore you retreat and say, “No, no, it’s probably just a feeling,” and you interpret yourself that way. I’m saying: no, it’s probably only a feeling—but I’m not sure that’s really the correct interpretation of yourself. Okay, so I think here too there is a structure very similar to that. First of all, there is a distinction between emotion and intellect; and second, the emotion is often an expression of a process you underwent intellectually. Meaning, after you internalized it properly and arrived at the true conclusion, such a feeling also came into being. Okay? And then when you fail to reconstruct or validate the intellectual move, you say, “Fine, so it’s probably a detached feeling; it’s not the result of an intellectual process but probably just an experience or just a feeling.” And that’s not true; it’s simply because you can’t validate it. The same thing happens with all sorts of other beliefs. People—yes, right now too on the website I had some discussion with someone, some brain researcher who comes there once every so often and goes back to some argument that plays out every few weeks, some letter, or every few months, I don’t know. So he too operatively constructs for himself a picture as though there is free will and we have consciousness, but only operatively; he doesn’t really believe it. Okay, what does that mean, he doesn’t really believe it? It’s obvious to me that he does believe it. He doesn’t admit it, but it’s obvious to me that he believes it. Only what? He doesn’t know how to justify it, and therefore he says, “No, it’s only operative.” At least that’s my impression; I don’t know him, I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem to me that every person’s desire… if he’s not religious, then what’s the problem believing in it? And if he is religious, what’s the problem believing in it? No, if he is religious, then in that sense—on the contrary, religious people usually believe in free will more than secular people do today. Today there’s some kind of trend, following neuroscience and deterministic scientific conceptions, that people somehow increasingly don’t believe…

[Speaker I] They become

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …determinists more than people—on the contrary, today it’s perceived as a debate between believers and non-believers. The debate shouldn’t be that way, but that’s how it’s perceived. In fact, believers are usually the non-determinists. Sompolinsky is an exception, because he’s a believing, religious person and yet he’s a determinist.

[Speaker J] They asked him in a lecture I saw how that fits together.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, it doesn’t fit together.

[Speaker J] He didn’t answer.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, this claim—that a person sometimes rationalizes to himself because he doesn’t know how to provide a basis for what he thinks, and then defines it either as emotion or as an operative definition, all sorts of concepts—seems to me simply to be self-deception. He isn’t lying, but he’s interpreting himself incorrectly, because he can’t find a basis, so he says, “Fine, so operatively I think it’s true.” So in the last letter I asked him: tell me, if operatively you think so, if it seems true to you, then why assume it isn’t? Why just assume, for no reason, that you’re living in a movie? I mean, I’m saying: if you live within a deterministic picture, then be a determinist.

[Speaker H] It seems right to me, but I don’t know how to explain why that is.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so you can’t explain it—so what? There are lots of things. I also can’t explain why there’s a clock here, but I see that there’s a clock here, so apparently there’s a clock here. Why assume I’m delusional? I don’t understand this way of thinking, where people somehow feel that determinism is obviously true even though it’s obvious to me that it isn’t true—that is, I experience very clearly that it isn’t true. But I’m a determinist. What? You’re not a determinist, man. You don’t believe in determinism. Yes, but he explains it to himself by saying that only on the operational level he doesn’t believe. Fine. It’s very hard to argue with these guys because they’re just talking nonsense, but you can’t say to him, listen, you’re talking nonsense. He’s a smart person. No—a smart person talking nonsense. There’s that line from George Orwell; just a few days ago I saw someone quote it and I looked it up: there are things so idiotic and absurd that only intellectuals can believe them. Which is completely true, by the way. The most absurd and craziest things exist only among intellectuals. Ordinary people usually don’t get to absurd things; they have common sense—not overly sophisticated, but healthy. And they won’t say nonsense. I mean, not very often. By the way, sophisticated absurdities—you won’t find those among ordinary people. Sometimes there are things like superstitions or simple beliefs, but sophisticated absurdities, where you build an elaborate structure to justify them—that’s only intellectuals. And intellectuals can create some possibility—look, maybe I really am delusional, and everything is just operational, and there’s no choice and nothing at all. What nonsense. He believes in choice, and he knows there is choice, and there is nothing he knows more clearly than that. To know at all means that you have choice; otherwise what does it mean that you know? That itself—there is no such thing as knowing if you have no judgment, so what does it mean that you know? You’re programmed to think that way. So what does it mean that you know? If you know, that means you decided. It’s just self-defeating. To me that’s nonsense. But intellectuals can do anything. I mean, you can’t talk to them. Immediately: yes, that’s Humean, and that’s so-and-so’s approach. Leave me alone with approaches; I have an argument. What do you say about this argument? What do I care about approaches? In one case, where some people in that forum I participated in thought this way—there was some kind of group there, a kind of guild, that had already developed its own language. A sort of Haredi rationalist community. And they already have—I don’t even remember the expression—there’s some phrase there, without mentioning names. Don’t mention names. You make an argument, and the other person answers: ah, okay, that’s a Humean approach. What do I care whether it’s a Humean approach? Tell me what you think about the argument. Is it a good argument or not? Do you agree or not? Where’s the problem? But from a philosopher you’ll never get that. From a professor of philosophy. From a philosopher, yes. From a professor, never. He’ll tell you: well, that’s a Humean approach, but there’s also another approach. The other approach is complete nonsense. But still—yes, there are disputes and you can’t know, and every article maps out a whole range of possibilities. Usually all those possibilities either agree, or most of them are nonsense and one is correct, and that’s it. I think there are almost no disputes in philosophy. Contrary to the common image?

[Speaker C] What do you mean? Just because the Rabbi thinks some of the views are nonsense doesn’t mean there isn’t a dispute.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, it does mean there isn’t a dispute. No, it’s such nonsense that it means even the person himself doesn’t believe it. He’s made up some rationalization for himself, and so he invented some possibility that maybe exists—maybe I’m delusional. Fine. But he understands that he’s not delusional. So what—this is what you call a dispute? He raised some speculation that nobody, including him, believes. Is that an option too? No, it’s not an option. Fine. Okay, I just want to—I’ll take this out—there’s a wonderful book here, and I really recommend that you read it. A small booklet, you can get through it very quickly, by C. S. Lewis. From Narnia—the author of Narnia. A children’s writer, yes. He was a friend of Tolkien, a British fantasist. The professor among the British writers of fantasy for children. Not necessarily for children, actually; Tolkien isn’t only for children. But among other things, at a certain point he was born again, what they call reborn, newborn. In other words, he returned to Christianity. And he started writing about philosophy, and he really says many things—someone pointed out to me that a great many of the things I wrote actually appear here—and he has an extraordinary ability to formulate things and define them. He has a beautiful book that I highly recommend reading. So he begins—chapter 1 of the book: Men Without Chests. The chest is the Platonic metaphor; never mind. In the head there is thought, in the belly there are the urges, and the chest is something in between. That’s the virtues and the aesthetic and ethical capacities, and all that is located in the middle. So he calls it the chest, and then there are men without chests. Fine. Now, the men without chests are what we would today basically call postmodernists, but he’s writing this in the early twentieth century. I doubt whether we pay enough attention to the importance of basic textbooks. Therefore I have chosen as the point of departure for these lectures a little literature textbook intended for boys and girls in the eleventh and twelfth grades. I do not suppose that the two authors of the said book had any intention of doing harm. And I ought to thank them, or their publisher, for having sent me a complimentary copy. He was a professor, so they sent it to him—maybe they wanted him to write a review or something. Nevertheless, I do not have even one good word to say in their praise. And that places me in a rather awkward position. I have no desire to denounce two active and modest teachers who did the best they could, but I cannot remain silent about the true tendency of their work as I understand it. I shall therefore use fictitious names and call them Gaius and Titius, the authors. In the introduction, by the way, he identifies who the authors are and what the book is, and I shall call their book The Green Book. But I assure you that such a book really exists and is sitting on my shelves. In the second chapter of their book, Gaius and Titius present the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. It isn’t known to me, but never mind. You surely remember that two tourists were present, one of whom called the waterfall sublime, while the other called it pretty. They had an argument: one said the waterfall was sublime, and the other said the waterfall was pretty. And Coleridge, inwardly, accepted the first opinion and rejected the second with disgust. And this is Gaius and Titius’s interpretation. This is Coleridge’s story; now the literature teachers, the ones who wrote the book, this is the interpretation they propose. When the man said, “This is sublime”—yes, that sentence, “This is sublime”—he seemed to be saying something about the waterfall. In fact—these are omissions—not about the waterfall was he speaking, but about his own feelings. What the man actually said was: I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime. He said nothing about the waterfall; he said something about his own feelings. Or in short: I have sublime feelings. So, then, a large number of deep questions are here resolved with great brevity. Here, of course, he’s already being ironic. But the authors still haven’t finished speaking. They add—now a quotation—this confusion is constantly present in language as we use it. We seem to be saying something very important about something else, but in fact we are only saying something about our own feelings. Really, you can take this very far. When I say there’s a clock here, I’m not talking about the world at all; I’m talking about the fact that in my consciousness right now there is a sensation of a clock, of the presence of a clock. I said only something about myself—“Only of myself did I know to tell,” as the saying goes. Yes, I’m not talking about the world. Before we examine the issues arising from this small but important passage, we must clear away a minor confusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even from their own point of view—indeed from any conceivable point of view—it cannot be that the man who says “This is sublime” meant to say “I have sublime feelings.” That interpretation is simply impossible. Even if we accept the assumption that qualities like sublimity are not properties of the things themselves but a projection of our feelings onto them, still, the feelings that arouse the projection complement the projected qualities and are therefore almost the opposite of them. The feelings that lead a person to call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of awe. If there is any room at all to reduce “This is sublime” to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, the correct translation is: I have feelings of humility. I’m standing before something sublime, so in me there are no feelings of sublimity; there are feelings of humility when I stand before it. We spoke earlier about awe before exaltedness; this is very similar. Before the numinous, in Rudolf Otto’s language, when one stands before the Holy One, blessed be He, it’s not mere fear. He distinguishes between fear and the numinous, and also between the numinous and the sublime. It’s a kind of religious awe; he tries there to define the concept. Consistent application of Gaius and Titius’s view would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to claim that the meaning of the statement “You are contemptible” is “I have contemptible feelings.” And that’s not true. On the contrary, I have feelings of superiority toward you because you are contemptible. In other words, you are the source of those feelings. The feelings in me are feelings of condescension; you are contemptible. Okay, so you already understand from here that saying the waterfall is sublime is a statement about the waterfall, not about me. Only a sublime waterfall arouses in me feelings of humility. So when I say the waterfall is sublime—he’ll say later—that is a statement about the waterfall; it is not a statement about me. Otherwise there could not have been any argument at all between the man and the woman. He said the waterfall is sublime, she says it is pretty, and Coleridge agrees with the first one. Agrees here. It’s like I say I’m afraid at night, and the other says no, that’s not true, actually I’m not afraid at night. What do you mean, not true? What kind of argument do we have? I’m afraid and you’re not afraid—what kind of dispute is that? A report about feelings is not something one can argue about. I have these feelings, you have different feelings, fine. When you argue with someone, that means those feelings express something. And this connects to what I said earlier: the religious feeling expresses the fact that there is God. It’s not a statement about me. Because if I say it’s a statement about me, then by the same token saying there is a clock here is also a statement about me—that right now I have a feeling of the presence of a clock on the wall. And the same is true of evaluative moral or aesthetic judgments like “this is sublime,” “this is beautiful,” or something like that, “this is moral” or “this is immoral.” These are not statements that merely come to describe the feelings taking place within me. Rather, these are statements meant to say: something is happening before me that arouses these feelings in me and ought to arouse these feelings. That is, when I say the waterfall is sublime, I expect everyone to see here the sublimity of the waterfall, and for feelings of humility to arise in everyone when they stand before the waterfall. And if that doesn’t arise in someone, then something is wrong with his aesthetic perception. That’s really what I want to claim. It’s not that I’m reporting my feelings to him and he’ll report his feelings to me and each of us will go on his way in peace. Okay, further on, this is basically his claim, and he explains that this whole business is really philosophy in the guise of literature. It’s when… two literature teachers write a book of bad philosophy, instead of writing a book about literature, which is what they understand and what they’re supposed to teach. It has nothing to do with literature. Because you can describe these fictions in elevated literary form, and you can describe those same fictions—you can say they are fictions and the literature can still be wonderful literature. And you can say it’s fiction and say it’s nonsense. He gives an example here. They compare it, yes—they say: in the fourth chapter of their book they quote a silly advertisement for a pleasure cruise and proceed to inoculate their students against the type of writing displayed in it. The advertisement tells us that purchasers of tickets for the said cruise—now this is a quote from the advertisement—will cross the western ocean sailed by Drake from Devon, Francis Drake the well-known pirate, on an adventure in search of the treasures of the West Indies, and will bring back with them on their return a treasure of golden hours and glowing colors. That’s the advertisement of this shipping company. Indeed, this is bad writing, a cheap and disgusting exploitation of feelings of awe and pleasure that human beings feel when they visit places that evoke in them strong associations with history or with legends, with foundational myths in our culture. And here you take that and use it for some pleasure cruise in order to get money out of people. So he says: but the problem here is not that your metaphors are metaphors and don’t describe facts—that you won’t come back with a treasure, you’ll come back with a metaphor of treasure. That’s what they say. This is not a lesson in literature; it’s a lesson in bad philosophy. Obviously. But even metaphors can be used artistically, to create from them a text with artistic value, and to educate children to identify a text that has literary value as opposed to a bad text, which is this advertisement. But what is bad in the advertisement is not that it uses metaphors and doesn’t describe simple facts. That’s just nonsense. And to write this in the framework of a literature textbook is precisely not to teach literature. Because in order to teach literature, you need to take this and explain that it is a metaphor, and set alongside it a text that uses metaphors properly—not in order to squeeze money out of you.

[Speaker D] Regarding that waterfall, then what is the source of the dispute between the one who says “pretty” and the one who says “sublime”?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They have an argument about what the waterfall is. One of them thought—

[Speaker D] One ought to feel feelings of sublimity.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. They have an argument about what people ought to feel. One is right and the other is wrong. But they have an argument because they are talking about the waterfall; they are not talking about themselves. If they are talking about themselves, then they have no argument. That doesn’t mean a person can’t be mistaken—he can be mistaken—but he is making a claim about the world. It could be that the claim is mistaken. They have an argument. He says they could have used the famous passage from Johnson’s book on the Western Isles and the conclusion that appears there: There is no man to be envied whose patriotism would not grow stronger on the plain of Marathon, or whose faith would not increase among the ruins of Iona. There too—what exactly is the connection between patriotism and the plain of Marathon, and so on? You could criticize that too on the same level, that you aren’t really describing facts but using metaphors. But that is excellent literature. And this advertisement is simply a bad cash-extractor. Okay? So the difference between them is not the question of whether you describe facts or use metaphors, whether you are talking about yourself or talking about the world. In every case you are talking about the world through the feelings it arouses in you. But that is not what distinguishes good literature from bad literature. That distinguishes bad philosophy from even worse philosophy. And that is really his claim. Then he says that this is how the youth are being educated. And I say: this brings us back to faith, to what I spoke about earlier. The question is whether, when I say there is a God, that is a statement about me—that within me there awakens the experience of the sublime and I stand before the sublime—or whether, when I say that I stand before the sublime, that is a claim about the world: that there is in it something sublime that arouses in me awe before exaltedness, which are my feelings. Okay? And therefore many times I say that I am standing before something that ought to arouse such-and-such a feeling. So that is a statement about the world. It is not a statement about me. Otherwise you have emptied all statements in the world of content. Even factual statements, you could say, are statements about me, as I said earlier. Okay, you can read all the rest here too, but it really is a beautiful essay, and I recommend it. It’s called The Abolition of Man.