Negative Attributes, Lecture 3

Table of Contents

• Initial conceptions of describing the Holy One, blessed be He
• The problem of meaning in negative attributes and the gap between the wise man and the fool
• Types of negation: nullification, conceptual negation, opposition, and abstraction-negation
• Poetry, halakhic / of Jewish law study, and parables as abstraction
• The shofar blast, silence, and Rashi: a sound emerging from silence
• The sefirot, the supreme crown, and the will to be revealed
• Rema of Fano, the Thirteen Attributes, and an a fortiori inference
• Leibniz, the identity of indiscernibles, and the bearer of properties
• Understanding versus seeing, “No man shall see Me and live,” and the grasp of attributes
• Opening the reading in the Guide: chapters 58–60 and translation
• Negative attributes in Maimonides: “the true attribute,” deficiency, and equivocation
• The parable of the man seen from afar and the distinction between positive and negative attributes
• “To set the intellect straight” and the example of “existent” versus “its absence is impossible”
• Philosophical examples: Mary’s room, Plato, and the Third Man Paradox
• The wise man and the prophet in the Maharal: pure thought versus cognition
• The elephant parable in chapter 60 and a warning against imaginary belief
• Attribute, set, and uniqueness: intersecting properties versus the problem of equivocation
• Love of God, human language, and the distinction between “who He is” and “how we relate to Him”

Summary

General Overview

The text summarizes the previous discussion about the possibility of describing the Holy One, blessed be He, and presents the position of the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim and of Maimonides, while emphasizing the problem with taking negative attributes literally and proposing a solution through distinguishing between different kinds of negation. The speaker argues that the negative attributes in Maimonides are not negation by opposition, but rather a move of “abstraction-negation,” which strips away coarse “garments” from the description in order to approach an understanding that cannot be formulated. He connects this to the way poetry works and to halakhic / of Jewish law analysis as processes that refine meaning by removing imprecise formulations. He then begins reading from Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (Part I, chapter 58 and onward), explains the concepts of deficiency and equivocation in positive attributes, and tries to show that Maimonides himself hints in the direction of “setting the intellect straight,” rather than conveying direct positive content.

Initial conceptions of describing the Holy One, blessed be He

The speaker presents an initial view, that of the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim, according to which it is impossible to describe the Holy One, blessed be He, except with respect to His essence in saying that He exists and that He is one, and with respect to descriptions of His actions. Maimonides adds the possibility of describing Him Himself through negative descriptions rather than positive ones. The speaker notes that when negative attributes are understood literally, they appear almost empty of content and raise sharp difficulties, such as the claim that there is no real difference between saying “He is merciful” and saying “He is not cruel,” if in any case neither side applies to Him in the ordinary human sense.

The problem of meaning in negative attributes and the gap between the wise man and the fool

The speaker formulates the difficulty as a problem of the difference in knowledge between “the wise” and “the fools,” when it seems that neither knows anything positive about the Holy One, blessed be He, but only what He is not. He asks in what sense someone who knows only negations is considered to know more, if the negation leaves no content behind, only a list of “not this.” He poses the question whether the process of negation can leave at the end “some kind of understanding,” even if it cannot be translated into words, as the key to understanding Maimonides’ approach.

Types of negation: nullification, conceptual negation, opposition, and abstraction-negation

The speaker defines several forms of negation: negation of nullification, conceptual negation with an aleph, and negation of opposition, like one versus zero or one versus minus one, and he argues that these do not explain what Maimonides means. He proposes a third type called “abstraction-negation,” in which the negation does not reverse the description and does not nullify it, but rather refines it and strips it of anthropomorphic concreteness. He compares this to taking off clothes: the descriptions are “garments,” and the goal is to remove the garments in order to try to stand on what lies behind them, even if nothing direct can be said about that “behind” except that it is the same one who wears the garments.

Poetry, halakhic / of Jewish law study, and parables as abstraction

The speaker connects this “negation of abstraction” to the way a poetic text works, where the words serve as a medium that clothes something not identical with the literal verbal content. He describes halakhic / of Jewish law analysis as a process in which possible explanations are negated until an inner understanding remains, and says that it is not correct to describe the result as “nothing,” but rather as a refinement of meaning. He mentions examples like giving a bill of divorce, motion and speed, and changing states, as attempts to understand dynamics through static descriptions, and as parables that sharpen what abstraction-negation is.

The shofar blast, silence, and Rashi: a sound emerging from silence

The speaker describes the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah as “the peak of possible abstraction,” where words are stripped away and what remains is melody, and then even the melody is stripped away and what remains is a simple sound “without any modulation at all.” He connects this to crowning the Holy One, blessed be He, as a parable that requires abstraction in order to understand that this is not “kingship in the ordinary sense,” and suggests that the proper mode is “to be loudly silent,” like “a still small silence.” He mentions “a still small voice” and brings, in the name of Rashi, an interpretation of it as “a sound emerging from the silence,” and emphasizes the claim that within the silence itself there is something for one who listens carefully, even though every attempt to formulate it immediately returns to garments of formulation that lose the thing itself.

The sefirot, the supreme crown, and the will to be revealed

The speaker digresses to a kabbalistic description of the “Infinite Light” filling reality (the opening of Etz Chaim by the Ari), withdrawal, an empty space, and the return of a “line” that takes shape in vessels or sefirot. He presents the order of the sefirot—wisdom, understanding, knowledge; kindness, strength, beauty; eternity, splendor, foundation, and kingship—and places above them the crown, as something that is not “really a sefirah” but rather that which the sefirot clothe. He cites, in the name of the Raavad in his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, that “this supreme crown is the will to be revealed,” and distinguishes between the will to be revealed and actual revelation, the sefirot already being forms of revelation.

Rema of Fano, the Thirteen Attributes, and an a fortiori inference

The speaker mentions the Rema of Fano, who draws an analogy between the thirteen hermeneutic principles by which the Torah is interpreted and the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy—“The Lord, the Lord, God, merciful and gracious”—and also connects this to a Brisker Haggadah on “Who Knows One,” which interprets “thirteen principles” as “an a fortiori inference, a verbal analogy, an inductive principle from one verse.” He describes the interpretation of the Rema of Fano according to which the first “The Lord” points to what is above it, and therefore parallels an a fortiori inference as an ascent from the lighter case to the stricter one. He presents all this as processes of abstraction that assume that after the abstraction something remains, and not “nothing.”

Leibniz, the identity of indiscernibles, and the bearer of properties

The speaker cites Leibniz’s principle of “the identity of indiscernibles,” according to which two entities with the same collection of properties are the same entity, and argues that Leibniz is wrong because he identifies the thing itself with the totality of its properties. He proposes that there is a “bearer of the properties” that carries the properties, and therefore when the properties are abstracted away from the thing, “the thing itself” remains and not emptiness. He parallels this to our relation to the Holy One, blessed be He, and to the way a connection is created through properties: one can begin from the properties and still arrive at a relationship with the one who bears the properties, even when the relationship is no longer dependent on them in the same way.

Understanding versus seeing, “No man shall see Me and live,” and the grasp of attributes

The speaker clarifies that abstraction does not lead to “seeing” but to “understanding,” and compares this to the fact that when you abstract a table from its properties, there is not “something you see” but “something you understand.” He returns to the claim that this is the difference between the wise man and the fool in Maimonides: the wise man is left with an understanding that cannot be poured into words. He adds that the “attributes” of the Holy One, blessed be He, are not properties like the color white in relation to a table, but rather “objects” or “entities” that have some relation to Him, and he says he will speak about this in the next topic in connection with tzimtzum.

Opening the reading in the Guide: chapters 58–60 and translation

The speaker announces that he now wants to read Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed, Part I, chapter 58 and onward, and notes that he marked three chapters: 58, 59, and 60. He says that he is using a text from the responsa project, and wonders whether it is the translation of Kapach or Ibn Tibbon, and mentions the new translation by Schwartz from Tel Aviv University, while claiming that Schwartz criticizes Kapach for inconsistency in philosophical translation.

Negative attributes in Maimonides: “the true attribute,” deficiency, and equivocation

The speaker reads from Maimonides: “Know that the attributes of the blessed Name expressed by negations are the true attribute,” and explains that Maimonides claims that positive descriptions cause “equivocation” and “deficiency.” He interprets “deficiency” as the gap between the coarse attribute and the true thing, and argues that the relation here is one of abstraction and not opposition, and therefore in his view one can already see here that Maimonides is aiming at “abstraction-negation.” He explains “equivocation” by saying that an attribute places the thing described into a group, and presents this as both a theological and a logical problem: every shared property is in principle common to more than one object, and therefore does not individuate.

The parable of the man seen from afar and the distinction between positive and negative attributes

The speaker brings Maimonides’ parable of seeing a man from afar and answering “a living being,” which provides a correct description but one that does not individuate, and explains that both negative attributes and positive attributes create only partial individuation. He quotes Maimonides’ determination that positive attributes “indicate a part of the totality of the thing whose knowledge is sought,” whereas negative attributes do not inform us of anything about the essence, but only remove mistaken possibilities. He points out that on its face this sounds like negation by opposition, but insists that such an understanding restores all the paradoxes, and so he interprets the move as abstraction that directs the intellect.

“To set the intellect straight” and the example of “existent” versus “its absence is impossible”

The speaker quotes Maimonides that negative attributes “must be employed in order to set the intellect straight,” and argues that this hints that the negation is not the transmission of simple content but rather guidance and refinement. He illustrates this with Maimonides’ words about saying “existent,” meaning that “its absence is impossible,” and asks what the difference is between “existent” and “not absent” if we are dealing with ordinary negation. He proposes that the solution is a distinction between the “idea of existence,” which can be stated positively, and the cognitive illustration of “existent” as a body with mass and spatial location, which is already a coarse attribute that does not apply to Him.

Philosophical examples: Mary’s room, Plato, and the Third Man Paradox

The speaker uses “Mary’s room” to distinguish between intellectual knowledge and the experiential cognition of the color red, and emphasizes that the mathematical description does not generate the feeling. He brings Plato’s “Third Man” paradox and rejects it with the claim that an idea does not have the properties that it includes, because an idea is a collection of properties and not an entity characterized by those very properties. He concludes that the grasp of ideas is intellectual and not visual, and warns against the illegitimate move from the idea to a concrete illustration.

The wise man and the prophet in the Maharal: pure thought versus cognition

The speaker cites an idea from the Maharal’s introduction to Gevurot Hashem about the difference between the wise man and the prophet: the prophet “sees” spiritual worlds, whereas the wise man “understands” intellectually, like mathematics that is true in every world. He uses this to deepen the distinction between cognition and thinking, and argues that with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He, only the intellectual dimension applies and not sensory-cognitive apprehension. He raises the question of how far the abstraction goes: can one remain with an intellectual understanding devoid of cognition, or does even understanding itself require further abstraction?

The elephant parable in chapter 60 and a warning against imaginary belief

The speaker quotes Maimonides’ elephant parable (chapter 60) about someone who gives an imaginary description of an elephant that corresponds to no reality, and argues that this illustrates how belief in an incorrect description of the Holy One, blessed be He, is belief in something that does not exist. He emphasizes that the speaker in the parable is not merely “falling short” in understanding the elephant, but is describing an imagined and false being, and thus belief is created in a missing thing that has been given the name of an existing thing. He notes that he disagrees with Maimonides on the point of identifying a thing with its properties, but accepts that there are essential properties without which the appearance of the thing cannot be described.

Attribute, set, and uniqueness: intersecting properties versus the problem of equivocation

The speaker sharpens the point that every attribute defines a set, whereas a name points to an individual, and explains that an individuating description is obtained only through the intersection of many sets until a single object remains. He argues that oppositional negation does not solve the problem of equivocation, because even “not cruel” defines a set. He concludes that an abstracting description is not a “description” in the sense of placing something into a set, and therefore only this way can one understand how negative attributes in Maimonides are supposed to escape equivocation and lead to understanding without collapsing into paradox.

Love of God, human language, and the distinction between “who He is” and “how we relate to Him”

The speaker distinguishes between the question of the essence of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the question of the human relation to Him, and explains that the commandment “And you shall love the Lord your God” raises a difficulty if love is understood as a human emotion. He suggests the possibility of an “intellectual love of God,” in which love is an intellectual act and a metaphor that requires abstraction of the relationship. He concludes by saying that the present discussion is focused on “who He is” and not on “how we relate to Him,” and stops after beginning the reading and laying out the framework for the coming chapters.

A summary of the previous sessions. A bit—meaning, this time I decided, as I said, to put the discussion before the reading, because I think otherwise we couldn’t have finished it. So basically, schematically, what we saw was that the initial conception—I chose the description of the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim—the initial conception was that it’s impossible to describe the Holy One, blessed be He, except in relation to His essence, meaning that He exists and that He is one, and in terms of descriptions of His actions. And then Maimonides came and added another possibility: to describe Him Himself, but by means of negative descriptions rather than positive ones. I spoke about the fact that when you look at the simple definition of negative attributes, it raises all kinds of problems; it seems a bit, almost empty of content. How did you get in? It was open. Did they lock it up there? Yes. You opened it? Yes. Great. There’s also some here. There’s some here—do you all have? So Maimonides adds the attributes, the negative mode of describing her—describing Him—when on the face of it, if we speak in terms of the simple definition of negative attributes, it seems very problematic. The question is: what’s the difference between saying that He is merciful and saying that He is cruel? Neither merciful nor cruel can really be said of Him, and saying that it’s not true that He is not merciful is the same as saying that He is merciful. What’s the difference between those statements? Or, in another formulation of the question: what’s the difference between the wise and the foolish? Right—what do the wise know that the fools don’t know? Neither of them knows anything about the Holy One, blessed be He. Maybe they know what He is not, but basically He is not everything. So in what sense are these people wiser than those in their knowledge of God? And then I said—I tried to define several kinds of negation. We spoke about negation of privation and negation of abstraction—well, with an aleph—and negation of opposition, meaning yes-one and zero, or one versus minus one. And I said that those two apparently are not enough to understand what kind of negation Maimonides means, and therefore we needed to define a third one. I called it negation by abstraction. Meaning, we are basically using descriptions that are too concrete. The purpose of the negation is not to reverse the description, not to nullify it, and not to choose an opposing description, but to abstract it. Meaning, to arrive at some attempt to describe externally what is inside. Abstraction in this sense is like—yes—like taking off clothes. Meaning, when you remove the clothes, you reveal what is underneath them or behind them. So you remove the garments; these descriptions are in some sense garments of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the goal is, through the garments, to try to say something about what lies behind them. But about what lies behind them, you can’t really say anything, so all you can say is that it is that same One who wears these garments, that these are His garments. And that basically means that you need to go through some process of abstraction in order to get from the description to what the description is really trying to say. And I connected that to what we discussed in previous sessions about poetry—how a poetic text, unlike prose, basically operates similarly. Meaning, you use words as a kind of medium, as a garment, but the thing you are trying to convey in the poem is not the literal content of the word or the literal meaning of the words, but some something that those words somehow clothe. And you have to perform some act of abstraction in order to try to reach the things hidden behind the words. And we saw examples of that as well in the context of Torah or Talmud, of study—halakhic study, halakhic analysis—where halakhic analysis is very often a kind of process of abstraction, or proceeding by way of negation, negating various possible explanations, when in the end it isn’t right to say that I’m left with nothing or left without understanding, but rather that the negation of the different explanations offered ultimately leaves me with some inner understanding. Yes, in some path of abstraction, with some understanding, in some way, of the thing itself. We spoke about giving a bill of divorce; I also used that example of motion, speed, and change of states in order to try to understand the dynamics through static descriptions. And basically all these are parables or attempts to define a bit more sharply what I mean when I say abstracting negation. And therefore, if I return to the issue of negative attributes, then there too, basically, we are doing the same thing that we do in the Talmudic analysis I described. We offer various definitions, realize that they don’t really capture the thing, don’t capture it fully. It’s not that they are unrelated to it or opposite to it—not at all, that’s not negation in that sense. Rather, they don’t capture the thing itself, but some garment of it. And we have to perform some abstraction until in the end we’re left with some understanding. We remain with some understanding such that every time we try to pour it into words, we arrive at a formulation that is not it. Meaning, it’s not the thing itself. And therefore—can one do the abstraction? Yes, that is the whole point of the process. And in the abstraction do you discover, as it were, something you didn’t know? Yes, that’s what you’re doing here too. Can we find something? You can find it, but not formulate it. Meaning, that’s exactly the point. You need to abstract. You know, I spoke long ago, years ago, once about blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. And I said that blowing the shofar is almost the peak of possible abstraction. Meaning, say a song is something with words and melody. Fine. If you abstract away the words, you’re left with a melody. What happens when you abstract away the melody? Then you’re left with some sound that has no variations, no special form, some simple sound that is only the sound itself without any modulation. Exactly—that’s the word. Without any modulation. And that is the blowing of the shofar. The blowing of the shofar is basically a kind of abstraction—the coronation of the Holy One, blessed be He, on Rosh Hashanah is done by means of the shofar. It is done by means of the shofar because the true way to crown Him is to understand that we are not speaking here of kingship in the ordinary sense as we know it in our world; it is some kind of parable, such that in order to understand what this thing really means, you have to abstract it. But that abstraction cannot be formulated in words, it can’t be set to melody, let’s say in this parable of the shofar. You have to remain with the thing that is behind the words, or that wears these words, okay? We should have been loudly silent. Exactly. We really should have had a moment of silence—we should have been silent. “A still, small voice”? Yes. And Rashi writes—by the way, that Rashi is really exactly this same point—what happens there with Elijah when he returns to Sinai: “The Lord was not in the noise,” and what does Rashi write there? I heard there is a voice emerging from the silence. Ah—isn’t it written there that this is the speech of angels or something like that? It could be there are two interpretations there, but one of them is this. “I heard”—I don’t know, some old French word—“I heard there is a voice emerging from the silence.” Yes, Eli Mohar once wrote, “for there is silence within the storming, there is hidden light in the darkness that vanished,” something like that, I no longer remember the exact words. So that is, I think, influenced by that Rashi. Meaning, it is basically some claim with the same message as what I said about poetry: that in the storm you have to perform the abstraction and understand what is the silence that stands behind the storm. And basically the opposite—looking at it from the other side—is to say that something sits within the silence. After you abstracted everything, there are no words, no melody, nothing, then you remain with the thing itself, with the thing itself. You’ll ask what that thing is? The moment I try to formulate it in words, in melody, or in some means of expression, I’ve lost it again. Meaning, even the phrase “a still, small voice” already defines the silence a little. A still, small silence. Therefore Rashi says there—exactly because of that, I think—that what is meant here is not silence but the voice that comes forth from the silence. Meaning, someone who listens well to the silence can understand that there is something within it. Silence is the absence of characterizations. Silence is—among the Hasidim they like to ask, right, if the nothing is something, is the nothing not? It seems to me this already appears among the Greek philosophers—they asked these kinds of questions. But indeed, keter, say—the supreme crown in the sefirot—is also called by another term: nothingness. Ayin, with an aleph, “nothing.” Now what is that? It is a kind of something—what is “nothing”? It is exactly that voice that emerges from the silence. Meaning, when you abstract the sefirot—I’m maybe going a bit far afield here, but okay, fine, a bit. In the sefirot too, what is described there is the infinite light; perhaps we’ll talk about this in the next topic. I’m planning to speak about the contraction. So perhaps there we’ll discuss it a bit more. But there was an infinite light that filled all of reality—this is how Etz Chaim of the Ari begins. Then it withdraws, and then some line returns into the empty space that remains. And that line is suddenly shaped by various forms, vessels or sefirot. You know, sefirot are basically attributes that suddenly begin to appear within that primordial thing, the infinite light that lacks every attribute. Okay? The attributes are the same thing that modulates it, yes, the same thing that gives it some specific shade, meaning something you can already begin to describe; it already has some characteristics. Now this whole collection of attributes begins with wisdom: wisdom, understanding, knowledge; lovingkindness, strength, beauty; endurance, splendor, foundation, and kingship. Right? But above all that there is the crown. Or crown, wisdom, understanding; or wisdom, understanding, knowledge—those are two ways of describing it. What’s the difference? Wisdom, understanding, knowledge are the garments; they are sefirot. The crown is not really a sefirah. The crown is the thing that the sefirot clothe. Yes, in the language of the Raavad in his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, the Raavad writes that the supreme crown is the will to be revealed. Not revelation. The sefirot are already a kind of revelation. The supreme crown is the will to be revealed, meaning the plan. It is still something primordial, still an undifferentiated something; one might call it primordial attributes, perhaps, as distinct from the light which is the essence, the thing itself. Okay? So how did I get to all this? Silence, all—yes. Exactly. So there too, basically, it is some kind of attempt to abstract. And once I also spoke about Rabbi Menachem Azariah of Fano, with the a fortiori argument where he draws an analogy between the thirteen principles by which the Torah is interpreted and the thirteen attributes of mercy—“The Lord, the Lord, God, merciful and gracious” on one hand, and a fortiori, verbal analogy, building from one verse on the other. I once talked about this maybe at the third Sabbath meal, I don’t remember. You know, in the Brisk Haggadah at the end, in “Who Knows One”—ah, in “One Kid”—no, in “Who Knows One,” sorry—in “Who Knows One.” And in the Brisk Haggadah, what are the thirteen? A fortiori, verbal analogy, building from one verse. Now there Rabbi Chaim explains regarding a fortiori—does he also have a whole teaching there along the way? Do they begin to explain what each principle means? No, no, he brings it as a collection. He really brings something Rabbi Chaim wrote there about a fortiori. Never mind, let’s leave it. But this analogy too has its foundation—here there is no analogy; here the Hasidim took it one way and the Lithuanians took it another way, but Rabbi Menachem Azariah of Fano makes an analogy. He finds a connection between the Name, for example, and a fortiori. The Name is once dim in relation to what is above it and so on. A fortiori is to rise from the lower to the higher. That’s a fortiori, right? To go from the lighter to the more severe, right? But he says that the supreme crown, the Name—the first Name—that basically points to what is above it, therefore it is basically a fortiori. I spoke about this there; I gave it a somewhat tighter interpretation. Here I’m just saying it in general. In any case, all these are basically processes of abstraction, but in the end the assumption is that after abstraction I am left with something. Not that if I abstract away everything, in the end I’m left with nothing. I spoke about Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles, right? Which says that if there are two objects that have the same collection of attributes, then they are the very same object. And I said that I think he is mistaken there because he identifies the object with the totality of its attributes. So according to Leibniz, indeed, the moment I abstract all the attributes from the object, I’m left with nothing. There is in fact nothing besides the collection of its attributes. But the truth is that that is not correct. There is also the bearer of the attributes. Meaning, there is the one who carries the attributes, which characterize him. When I abstract all the attributes away, I remain with the thing itself. And in that sense too, the abstractions we are talking about in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He, are a similar process. Basically in the end I use attributes—and we spoke about love, right? How do you create a relationship with someone? Through the attributes we create some relationship that is not necessarily love of the attributes, but can be love of the person who possesses them. The one with the attributes. And in the end that relationship is not necessarily dependent on the attributes anymore. And the same with the Holy One, blessed be He, when I say—again I return to abstracting negation—that when we try to create some relationship with Him or understand Him, even create a relationship of love, awe, and the like, it always has to be done through the attributes—sefirot in kabbalistic language, whatever—or the attributes. No, then you get to a state where “man shall not see Me and live.” No—the point is, you abstract the attributes completely and in the end you remain with the thing itself, which you won’t be able to formulate. Fine. No, what does “man shall not see Me and live” mean? About that I’ll speak next time. I think it means seeing in actuality. And He has no form, no bodily form. Obviously not—He has no bodily form. Of course not. But He does have attributes. So if that’s the case, then it means you can’t get to a state where you can abstract Him completely from all things and then see the—no, abstraction of the thing: when you abstract the thing, you don’t see it in the end after you abstract it. When you abstract the table from its attributes, you aren’t left with something you see; you’re left with something you understand. Understanding does exist also with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He. Understanding does exist also with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He. Understanding does exist also with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He. That is exactly the point Maimonides makes. After you abstract the attributes, you are left with some understanding. That is the difference between the wise and the fool. Meaning, the wise person understands something. True, it can’t be poured into words, but that is because words always try to describe it through descriptions, and descriptions do not truly capture Him. You don’t really… since you cannot see Him—as just as you cannot see Him, so too you cannot grasp any other aspect of Him. Why? Because His aspects are not related to Him the way the color white is related to the table. The color white is related to the table; it is simply an attribute of the table. Okay? Whereas the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, are not His attributes the way color is an attribute of the table. About that I will also speak in the next topic when we discuss contraction. His attributes are objects. They are not attributes. Sefirot, for example, or things like that, are a kind of entity. The color white is not a kind of entity; it is an attribute of the table. The only entity here is a table. It has an attribute, namely that it has the color white. A substantial entity? No, of course not. The good-heartedness of a person—is that an entity? It is not an entity. It describes the person; the person is an entity. Color isn’t? Well, there is the material of the color. No, no, fine, I’m not talking about that. The material of the color, okay, is part of the table. I’m speaking about the shade it projects, the character of the color. The character of the color is not a kind of entity; it is an attribute of an entity. Okay? That’s not the same thing. Good-heartedness is not a kind of entity; good-heartedness describes a person. You can’t touch whiteness. Yes—not only touch, even aside from touching, it is not an entity, it is an attribute. Whereas with the Holy One, blessed be He, His attributes are entities. Meaning that’s… and therefore one cannot… He does not have attributes in the same sense that a table has attributes. They are entities that bear some relation to Him. So we’ll discuss that in the next topic when we speak about it. Okay, so that is basically more or less the picture, with a few added nuances, that we arrived at last time. And what I want now is to read Maimonides in the Guide, Part I, chapter 58 and onward. I marked here three chapters: 58, 59, and 60. It continues a bit after that, but this is really the heart of the discussion. Now as I said, this is not Schwartz’s translation. I simply don’t have Schwartz’s text, so I took what is in the Responsa Project, which I think is Kapach’s translation in the Responsa Project. Is there Ibn Tibbon? I think it’s Kapach, it seems to me. What’s Schwartz? Just a question for me—what is Schwartz’s translation? A new translation. From Tel Aviv University. It only came out recently, and it reads almost like a novel, really. Yes? He also has an enormous introduction. He says that the Guide—and his teacher, Rabbi Kapach—was not consistent in his translation. In philosophy that is very important, because if you use the same word it conveys the same idea. Because Kapach, at least in his pretension, does aim to be consistent. But he proves—with all due respect, he is very respectful to him—and without even talking about all the other translations, which are inconsistent and confuse the reader, that’s enough for him. He’s a professor in Tel Aviv. Professor? One of ours, in Tel Aviv, one hundred percent. Thank you very much. A settler in Sheikh Munis. Fine. “Deeper than the previous one,” it says here in the heading. Know that describing God, may He be blessed, by negations is the true description. Meaning, the correct way, the proper way, to describe the Holy One, blessed be He, is by describing Him through negations, not by positive descriptions. “Which no failure can reach, and there is no deficiency with respect to the Creator at all, in any way.” Meaning, if you describe Him with negative descriptions, you do not damage Him, you do not attach deficiencies to Him, unlike positive descriptions. “But describing Him positively involves association and deficiency, as we have already explained,” and he did indeed speak about this a bit earlier. So when you describe the Holy One, blessed be He, with positive descriptions, there are two problems here. First, you make Him deficient, because every attribute is not the thing itself; it is still deficient relative to the real thing. By the way, that itself already says something about the kind of negation under discussion. Because the relation between the attribute and the real thing is not a relation of opposition, but rather the relation between the attribute and the real thing is one of abstraction. Meaning, the thing—the attribute by which you describe—is too thick or too coarse compared to the real thing. Which is exactly what it means that the process of negation is really a process of abstraction; it is not a process of opposition or mere privation. Okay? So I think you can already see that here. I’m saying that I always understood negative attributes in those senses, and then I got tangled up and thought it had no meaning at all. And then in this series I suddenly understood that I think negative attributes are negation by abstraction, and now I think you can really see it in Maimonides. Meaning, you can see in Maimonides that this is truly what he meant—that’s what I think. “May the living God be exalted.” What? “May the living God be exalted”—that’s negative. “He has no bodily form,” “He has no body,” and no, and no, and no. “He is one and there is no unity like His.” Yes, but the question is, again—if the doctrine of negative attributes—this isn’t exactly the doctrine of negative attributes. The doctrine of negative attributes as a philosophical theory involves all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes and problems; we spoke about this last time. And I think that if you look at negation as abstraction, then it resolves the difficulties. Privation still has something in it. What? Meaning the negation is the privation. I said it is close to privative negation. Negation by abstraction is a certain kind of privation, but privation in the same measure. Meaning, privation is simply making the thing disappear, whereas abstraction is refining it, refining it. Okay? So he says here that when I describe Him with a positive description there are two things: “it involves association and deficiency.” What is this doubling? The deficiency is clear, because it is too coarse, meaning yes—you need to abstract in order to get closer to the Holy One, blessed be He. But what is the association? Is the moral association abstract when you describe Him by some attribute? If I say that He is good. So saying that He is good is a kind of coarse description. Because when you think “good,” you imagine, say, the good that you know. That is presumably a coarse description compared to what it is with Him. With Him it is something more refined, more abstract. In that sense I say there is some deficiency here, okay? To describe Him in human language is a deficiency. Deficiency by definition. But what if you described an ideal human being? What? He is still a human being. No, exactly—he is still a human being. He is still a human being. And therefore in that sense he probably cannot be completely ideal. An ideal human being would not be simply human. You can’t describe something—and deficiency is one of the essential attributes of a human being, deficiency. So in any case, that is the deficiency. You don’t exactly—you can’t picture in your head something that falls upward, because from the day we were born we have always known that things fall downward. You say abstract things—it is good, good, good without limit. A good heart—whatever you describe—it should, I think we need to separate here. I may as well anticipate this already, because this really is a question that comes up throughout. Let me anticipate for a moment: I think I mentioned in one of the previous sessions Mary’s room. Remember? That physicist who knows all of optics backwards and forwards, and the question whether she knows what the color red is. And she lives in a black-and-white room, right? And she learned all the physics, all the literature and experiments, everything. She’s the world champion in optics. Fine—she doesn’t know what red is until she sees it, right? She understands very well what red is; maybe she understands that it is a certain wavelength and a certain character of the wave. But red—the feeling of red—she does not understand why that color feels, say, thrilling. Right, I spoke about this. She doesn’t understand why that color feels thrilling. That she can understand in one sense, but when she leaves the room into the real world, then the question is whether some knowledge has been added to her. Yes, exactly—that’s another way of saying it. I don’t know exactly what knowledge has been added to her, but something has been added. Yes—but what? No, I think she also can’t understand why it feels thrilling. Because in order to understand why it feels thrilling, again—unless you describe it as a mechanical process—then let’s leave that aside, right? That this wavelength hits the irritation department of the brain, excites electrons there, and then anger is produced. Fine, that she can understand. In any case, for our purposes: very often when we talk about good, we have a picture before our eyes of what is called good. Not necessarily a picture in the visual sense, but no—beyond an inner feeling, I want to say something more concrete. Meaning, I imagine various kinds of actions, kinds of attitudes of people, and that is not the good. A collection of static images. Exactly, exactly. Those are manifestations perhaps of the good; they are not the Idea of the good itself. Do you follow? Now the relation between the thing and the Idea is a relation of abstraction. Right? To understand horseness by contemplating a horse is a relation of abstraction, right? To understand what the color red is from its physical description—that is not abstraction; those are simply two totally different things. It is not—you cannot—it’s not a process of abstraction. If you refine what you want, you will not arrive at understanding what the color red is, what the sensation of red is, okay? So there are different kinds of transitions between the thing I grasp and the thing itself, and many times those are processes of abstraction. These processes are basically the deficiency he is speaking about here. You can understand what it means when you talk about what goodness is: if you are speaking about the Idea of the good, I think you can say that even positively about the Holy One, blessed be He, not negatively. But every realization of the Idea of the good, every concrete notion of good—that is already not it, that is already a deficiency, already too coarse. As we discussed, if you remember, regarding speed, right? So He has the potential for change of place, but change of place itself would not apply to Him, nor would improvement apply to Him, but the potential for improvement is there positively. I say it affirmatively, not negatively. The intention is that this is a completely abstract statement. It is not a statement tied to some picture, some image—picture again in the abstract sense, in the sense of the description of some thing. There is a difference between saying—for example, when I say that the wavelength of the Holy One, blessed be He, is two angstroms—I don’t know, just making it up—I have not said anything tangible by that. I did not say what He looks like. If you translate it into appearance, it is red. And that would be wrong to say about Him. But to say that His wavelength is such-and-such—that is an abstract statement. To say that He is one is an abstract statement. Wavelength—in one sense that’s fine, in another sense it isn’t abstract. In relation to the color red, it is abstract. That is mathematics. It is just some mathematical statement. Okay? So in that sense, it is like in the Maharal’s introduction to Gevurot Hashem, where he distinguishes between a sage and a prophet. I think it’s in the first introduction. The second introduction is what we studied about miracles. But in the first introduction—I think it’s in the first introduction—he makes that distinction. He says, what does it mean that “a sage is preferable to a prophet”? He says: a prophet sees spiritual worlds. He can see the world of creation, formation, emanation—I don’t know, higher worlds. But what he grasps is what he sees. Fine. But a sage does not see; he understands. What does that mean? A sage knows that two plus three equals five. He knows that the derivative of x squared is two x. That is true in every world. So the prophet also doesn’t see through the senses? No, he sees it in the imagination, not with the senses, but never mind. But seeing is a kind of cognition, not of thinking. He sees a formula. But not in the imagination; he also does not draw a picture. But again, that is still a kind of cognition, not of thinking—of cognition. But maybe in the sage too, at the cognitive stage behind the thinking, he does not—no, the sage thinks. That’s exactly the difference. The sage thinks. He can understand the character of higher worlds, but understanding in the intellectual sense is not grasping in the cognitive sense, exactly like mathematics and red light. That is already cognitive. Meaning, after the analytical stage—not only the stage of analysis, but to grasp it in a way that is not—no, but I do not grasp it. I know that here there are two sefirot and there are another two sefirot there, so together there are four sefirot in that place. I haven’t grasped anything by that. If I infer using logical tools, that is still not seeing. I am doing the mathematical calculation. Okay? Now, that calculation is true in every world; it is not limited. The prophet is limited to however far his vision reaches, yes, his spiritual vision. Meaning, your range of vision depends on the power of your vision; up to there you grasp. The sage, once he grasps an insight through wisdom, it is not limited by anything—it reaches all the way up. Meaning, if the Holy One, blessed be He, is one, then He is not two. That’s mathematics: one is not two. So that I can say about Him. The moment I try to imagine what one is and place before my eyes one book, one person, one marble—I don’t know what—that is already an attempt to grasp the one in the mode of cognition, not in the mode of thought. Cognitions do not belong there. So there is here, I think, it seems to me—I don’t know if this is what the rabbi meant—but it seems to me this is one sort of meaning of the abstraction I am talking about. And if we carry out the abstraction—yes, exactly, this is actually what I am now dealing with in another context. I said that I’m dealing with Platonism, with the Platonic character of the Talmud. That’s the current book of ours, not this little matter. So there is a paradox. In Platonic philosophy there is a paradox called the Third Man argument. This paradox says the following. Wait, did I tell this once? Did I tell it? Okay, so you weren’t here. What? I’m probably senile. In short, it says that there is a collection of human beings; you abstract, and you discover the form of the human. Fine? Now the Idea of the human. According to Plato, the Idea is a kind of entity. According to Aristotle it is an abstraction; it does not really exist. It is only attributes. We call it the form of the human, but there is no such thing; the form never appears separately from the substance it characterizes. Fine? But with Plato the Idea is a kind of existing entity. So they say: okay, that entity too has the characteristics of a human, so if so, it too must join the group of human beings. Once it joins the group of human beings, the group grows by one. Once the group grows by one, it must have another Idea appropriate to it, because every group has a different Idea according to Plato. So now another Idea of man emerges, and again it joins the group of human beings, and so on. Okay? Now the assumption there—there are many mistakes in that paradox, and you would not believe how many articles have been written about this, hundreds of articles, even down to our own day. It is unbelievable. It is simply a collection of errors. I cannot understand how people fall into these mistakes. But one of the most fundamental errors is that it is not true that the Idea of man has all the characteristics of man. That is simply a mistake. The Idea has no characteristics. The Idea is a collection of characteristics. The Idea itself has no characteristics. The Idea of largeness is not large. The Idea of redness is not red. It may have characteristics, but not those characteristics. Maybe—yes, correct—it has second-order characteristics, right. But not the characteristics that it contains. It contains a list of characteristics or a set of characteristics, but those characteristics do not characterize it. It is not characterized by those characteristics; rather those characteristics are included in the list of characteristics that define that Idea. Say, to be a human being is to have two legs, a heart, a head, a will, I don’t know, all kinds of things like that—that is the Idea of man. Does that Idea have a will? Obviously not. To be endowed with will is the Idea. But the Idea of being endowed with will does not itself have a will. Human beings have a will, not Ideas. Okay? This is simply a category mistake. So why did that come to mind? Because that means that the grasp of Ideas is truly not a visual grasp. Meaning, if I—this is a subtle point, notice: when I think about the Idea of horseness, I am actually imagining a horse. If I want to be more precise on the philosophical level, I need to write down a list of attributes, not think about a horse. To write a list of attributes—that is the only way I can grasp an Idea. Someone who sees before his eyes an ideal horse is not seeing the Idea of horse; he is seeing something else. The Idea of horse is not a horse. It is a list of attributes of the horse. It is an entity of an abstract kind. It has no appearance. It is not—it includes the attribute of having such-and-such an appearance. Not that it possesses that attribute, but rather it includes the attribute of being—no, that is not called seeing, that is just equivocation. So then it is called something else; he has another sense different from our sense of sight. That is not a different wavelength. If it were a different wavelength but still optical, I would understand. But there, there are no optical properties. And it is not… so here exactly now, grasping of this type—speaking about the Holy One, blessed be He, in the sense of Ideas—I think that perhaps can be said, even positively. But when I translate those Ideas and I am not really seeing horseness but seeing the horse—if I write it in words without making it concrete for myself, and not only visually by the way, even if I don’t concretize it visually but in some other way, once you have moved into concretization, then you have already done something illegitimate, something too coarse. Fine, but if I just write attributes in a completely logical way, meaning not cognitively but purely intellectually, like the mathematics of the electromagnetic wave, then you can describe the mathematical function of the electromagnetic wave and there is no grasp here in the cognitive sense, in the sensory sense. It is simply an empty description. But someone who has never seen a horse won’t understand from that what a horse looks like. נכון—that’s right. The Idea of horseness you can understand only by looking at a horse. Fine, but the Idea of horseness does not have the attributes of a horse. And therefore… but the cognitive grasp you have of the Idea of the horse, still I can say that this belongs to cognition, to such a grasp, and with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He, even the Ideas that you say can be spoken of positively, that is not… no, if you think carefully about the Idea of horseness, then you’ll see that I don’t think any cognition belongs to it, of any sort. It is only an intellectual grasp. It is not cognition. You arrive at it through observing horses, but in the end—it is like there cannot be for you cognition of the mathematical dimension of the electromagnetic wave, to say that the function is a sine. Fine, sine of kx minus omega t. Well, it doesn’t matter, something times x minus something times t. That is the form of a progressive wave, though not exactly progressive, never mind. Non-sensory cognition? No, that is not cognition, that is thought. That is why there is an extremely subtle point here, but it seems one has to pay close attention because this is the crux of the matter here. When I arrive at the function, the function does not constitute cognition of the—exactly, that’s knowledge. It is done in the intellect, not in cognition. And therefore you do not… there is no statement here about what that wave is, or how it looks, or how it is perceived. It is a formal description empty of cognitive content altogether; it is pure thought. Like knowing how to use the formula. You can translate an optics book into Braille, and the blind person who reads it will get a hundred on all the exams. Like Omri, right. Fine. So therefore it seems to me that this may be a good analogy for this matter of the required abstraction—arriving from the thing to the Idea, that is really the point. Now the Idea—when I say the Idea—I am saying something positive, not negative. Notice that because the negation I am employing here is not negation of opposition but negation by abstraction, when I finish the abstraction what am I left with? I am left with an Idea. The Idea I am allowed to say about the Holy One, blessed be He, positively. I can say that He is good, and in my claim that would be true, I think. But when I begin to imagine to myself what good is, then immediately of course, just as horseness connects itself to horses, goodness connects for me to kinds of actions, kinds of attitudes, kinds of people, kinds of experiences or feelings of kind-heartedness or cruelty and the like—and here I have already overstepped. That I need to abstract away. You follow? So in the end I remain with zero cognition, but not with zero understanding. That’s not the same thing. Meaning, with understanding I can understand very well what a horse is and what an electromagnetic wave is, even if I completely abstract cognition away. Let’s say someone came—suppose humanity as a whole had arrived at the electromagnetic wave through observation, and afterward all of us lost the sense of sight, but the knowledge remained. The knowledge would remain, all of us would lose the sense of sight, and we could not grasp at all what an electromagnetic wave is. Fine? But the knowledge remains. And say children already—children who don’t even remember what seeing is, right? Meaning those who no longer have any idea what seeing is. Fine? And they still have the knowledge. So that knowledge is knowledge that is true of the electromagnetic wave. It contains nothing whatever of cognition, or of the sensory encounter, or the cognitive encounter, in trying to understand what an electromagnetic wave is. Not understand intellectually, but grasp—not understand, grasp. Grasping is impossible; understanding is possible. So perhaps therefore—I don’t know—there is room to discuss whether with understanding too one must go through that same process of abstraction, and perhaps understanding too is unavailable to us, or whether Maimonides means to say: no, once you reach only the Idea without any cognition, pure thought, that you can say about the Holy One, blessed be He, even positively. When you speak about understanding, say, of the electromagnetic wave, you are already talking about attributes. Perhaps you don’t know it experientially, you don’t cognize it, but when Mary thinks about optics she knows how it behaves, how the waves behave. She knows various concrete things about the thing she does not cognize. Okay. Now to say that about the Holy One, blessed be He, really—these are attributes that I don’t cognize, but I know their behavior; meaning I know His ways of action. Of course you know His actions. That was already said even before Maimonides, that this you know. No, fine, but it’s not just actions of emanation; it is how the attributes themselves are supposedly structured. No, no, no, how the attributes are structured—that is exactly you carrying them over into cognition. I do not think that is correct. Why? I’m talking about wave and electromagnetic; I don’t know what it looks like, I don’t cognize it, I can’t imagine it, but I know how it works, how it is structured. What does “how it is structured” mean? You know various attributes of it in the intellectual sense. Not attributes in the sense of how it looks. But I understand the structure. Fine. To say that about the Holy One, blessed be He—can you say that? I don’t know if there is a contradiction here, but it seems to me that if this is—I’m not sure about this. Again, I don’t know; I am not sure of this, not sure of it. The question is how far this abstraction goes, in short. Can we remain with understandings that are intellect alone, devoid of cognition, or… or must some further abstraction be done even there? I don’t know. By means of descriptions, however fantastical they may be, I cannot cause in a person’s brain what a wave causes, for example. Red is a sensation in the brain. It is like if I smoke hashish—it is the most ideal thing—and all the formulas to explain to me what it is will not give me the feeling of smoking hashish. There is no such thing. I once thought if we could smoke hashish with formulas, it would solve a lot of problems; the cannabis law would solve everything. The color red is a sensation in the brain that causes me to see the color. All the mathematics and all the proofs—that’s the difference between grasp and understanding. Exactly. Grasp in the sense of cognition is not the same as understanding. That is “wise and understanding,” what I said from the Maharal there. In everything related to the Holy One, blessed be He, I can only understand, and not cognize. Now the question is whether—Ido said before—maybe one cannot even understand. Maybe one must continue the abstraction even further. Only some approximation—I don’t know. I simply assume, since we are speaking here about the infinite, which I do not understand either, that we are talking about approximations, I think. Perhaps. I am not sure. I am not sure at all. I am not sure. But regarding understanding, I think understanding may be—I don’t know in principle. Fine, I don’t know. There is a question here of getting the formulation right. We already talked about this in previous sessions, because once it is emptied of content, once it is… yes, first of all, what makes them wise? Second, once the thing you believe in is empty of all content, then what do you believe in? He ends the last chapter as if it is nothing. He ends the last chapter with his famous elephant parable—that’s chapter 60; that is where the parable appears. You believe… you are left with that intuition, some intuition that you don’t know how to define. “And the parable for this is that of a man who heard the name elephant and knew that it is an animal, and sought to know its form and reality. And one who errs or misleads said to him: it is an animal with one leg and three wings, dwelling in the depths of the sea, its body transparent, and without broad face like a human face and form and shape; and it speaks like a human, and sometimes flies through the air and sometimes swims like a fish.” And I am not saying that this person described the elephant in a distorted way, meaning that he erred in his conception of the elephant, nor that he fell short in understanding the elephant—but rather I say that the thing he imagined by this description is a fabricated falsehood, and there is nothing in reality that is like this. But it is a non-existent thing, to which he gave the name of an existing thing, like a marvelous camel and horse-man and so on. In short, what you’re talking about isn’t an elephant at all. It is just some thing that does not exist. So to believe something incorrect about the Holy One, blessed be He, is simply not to believe, because you believe in the wrong thing; in the right thing you do not believe. That is basically his claim. Right, but he says that the attributes are the thing. To say that the attributes are the thing. Right. Here I have some disagreement with him on this issue. Again, it depends. There are attributes that are truly perhaps essential to the thing, and that one can perhaps accept. Essential, certainly. If the thing can exist without any attributes, then I can also be mistaken about the attributes and the thing still remains. No, it would not be—it would not be without the essential attributes; it cannot appear without the essential attributes. And it is true that it is not the essential attributes, but it is never described without them. Not described—that doesn’t mean it isn’t. No, that it isn’t—I meant not described not in the sense that we don’t describe it, but that it itself is not characterized otherwise. Fine. Okay, let’s continue, let’s return to our matter. So I spoke about why positive descriptions involve deficiency. Why do they involve association? Interesting—I thought after the introductions we’d be able to run through the reading. Why is there association here? Because an attribute always involves association, by definition. If you say of someone, say, that he is red, then what you have really said is that he belongs to the group of objects that have the attribute of being red. Every attribute, by definition, is an attribute of a group of objects. Theoretically there could be an attribute of a group with only one object, theoretically, but in principle an attribute always refers to a group, okay? And therefore by definition, when you describe the Holy One, blessed be He, you have put Him into a group of things. So this is another side of that same issue of deficiency: association is deficiency. Meaning, once you put… but is it necessarily a mistake? What? Is it necessarily a mistake? He says yes, because you have placed Him into the group of existing things. No, “existing” we already discussed—existence is not an attribute. I’m speaking about attributes. So when I put Him into the group of red things, or kind-hearted ones, or bullies—I don’t know—great beings, then… association, basically. Because you give Him attributes that other objects also have. And therefore it connects us to the question of association. So once you describe the Holy One, blessed be He—association in the sense of the theological problem of association, not the logical problem. In the sense of association with multiple gods? Multiple gods, yes. Because if there is someone else who has attributes like the Holy One, blessed be He, then in some sense you have associated. Meaning, there are two here that have the same attributes. What? That you have associated Him, that you have associated the attribute? Of course. If I say there are two gods, fine, I have associated the attribute as well. After all, there are two. I did not say one is the other. They are two different ones. But both of them are gods. They have the same attribute. Fine. I said I really would not accept this with respect to all attributes, but for certain attributes… existence? What? As though that is the substance when you say that, and here you’re talking about an attribute so it’s not… but it’s always like that. When you say there are two gods, what is the problem of association? When you say there are two gods, fine? What does it mean to say there are two gods? Does it mean that God A is also God B? No, the opposite. Precisely that they are two, different. A is not B, and B is not A. So in what sense are both of them gods? Because both have the attribute—omnipotence, creating the world, whatever you want—of divinity. Okay? So that is exactly shared attributes. Association is always association in attributes. In essence one cannot associate. If it’s two, then it’s two. But the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself used association in “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Fine, those are the known problems, I’m not speaking about… but why the assumption that God’s uniqueness must consist in the uniqueness of zero and one? Meaning that He is x and there is nothing else. It does not have to. I do not think it has to be so, but Maimonides claims it is so. I don’t think it has to be, but Maimonides claims that even if you make an association while preserving a quantitative difference, as long as the difference is not qualitative but quantitative, it is still a kind of association. That is his claim. I don’t know if it’s obvious, but that is what he claims in any case. That is the point. Therefore when you give the Holy One, blessed be He, a positive attribute, by definition you have placed Him into a group. By definition. As distinct from—we spoke about the difference between a name and an attribute, right? I said that a name refers to one and only one specific person by definition. Fine? Again, “two Joseph ben Simons in one city”—that’s a problem in the Talmud—but in principle you can add another father’s name to single him out. A name is supposed to refer to one specific person and that’s it. That is the definition of a name. That is what makes a name individuating. Whereas an attribute, by definition, is an attribute that places him into a group, always. Meaning, when you say something is a table, then it is in the group of tables. If something is white, it is in the group of white objects. If something… meaning, an attribute always defines a group of things. Again, it could be that in practice there is a group that happens to contain one object, but by definition it characterizes groups. Attributes always define groups, unlike names. Names speak about individuals. Okay? Therefore, when you describe the Holy One, blessed be He, there is deficiency and association in it. That is what Maimonides says. But you say that is quantity, a quantity of attributes. No, every attribute is attached to a quantity of people or a quantity of objects. No, but if I begin with the first attribute to define the Holy One, blessed be He—say kind-heartedness, okay?—then it will include all human beings too, because they also have kind-heartedness. Correct. It applies to many objects. Non-divine ones. One attribute over many objects. Yes, and the second and third and seventeenth will too. Correct. Every attribute is relevant to objects, to a group of objects—not the same group. Not the same objects. No, certainly not. On the contrary. In the end, as we’ll see in a moment, there is an individuating description. When do I arrive at an individuating description? When I have given enough attributes, and each attribute defines a group, and the intersection of all those groups leaves me with one object. That is an individuating description, right? If I say of a person, for example, that he is one meter eighty, lives in Petah Tikva, and his name is Moshe, say, okay? Now suppose there is only one such person for the sake of discussion. So what am I saying? The group of people from Petah Tikva is many people. The group of people named Moshe is also many people—not the same people, a different group, right? The group of people who are one meter eighty is another group. Human beings, of course, is another group. Now when you take the intersection of all these groups, meaning who satisfies all the attributes? That is the one object that appears in all of those groups. So the intersection of all the groups gives one person. Once the intersection of all attribute-groups gives one object, then we have an individuating description. A description that—a collection of attributes, let’s call that collection a description—that defines one object. But that too is a group. So how can you speak of two gods, say? What do you mean? In the end if you add one attribute and another attribute, then there will be only one. Why not? No, on the contrary. If there is the same set of attributes, for example. That same Moshe from Petah Tikva, etc. No, but there it is a collection of attributes that all exist in A and also in B. But in the end Moshe is one. No. What do you mean “in the end”? In the end there’s one. There is no second Moshe. Fine, but with God? Someone who believes in association says there are two gods. Not one God. And each of the two has the same set of relevant divine attributes. Or they have no difference in attributes at all, or they differ in attributes, one is brown and the other yellow, but that is not essential to being divine. The essential attributes of being divine are shared by both. Okay? And there is no attribute that the Holy One, blessed be He, has—there is not one attribute that the Holy One, blessed be He, has and no group has—they have no attributes… I’m saying: he says all things are like this. It is impossible to attach an attribute to Him, because an attribute is always taken from your world of cognition, and therefore always related to a group of objects you know. Yes, but can’t it be oppositional negation? Because that too puts… what? Oppositional negation also places into groups. Right. That is a little bonus we got so that you can pray. But one attribute is enough, one attribute the Holy One, blessed be He, has—one isolated attribute out of a billion attributes… no, but an attribute by definition is an attribute of a group, always. Okay. Something one thing all groups have, and only the Holy One, blessed be He, has it, no one else has it… that still changes nothing. The moment you understand that the thing is an attribute, an attribute defines a group. That is the definition. Now the fact that the group contains one object is another matter—it may happen, accidentally. But it defines a group. Once it defines a group, there is already some sort of association here. If it is a singleton group, that’s not association? No, it is association—association at the level of principle, because the fact that this group contains one object is accidental. But He is not A and not B and not C… no, so we said, not being A is not an attribute. Fine. That’s the paradox, the refutation of Leibniz’s proof. But even if you say now about something that it is not, not, not, and not, there could still be two such things that are not all… that is what Ido said earlier too, that a negative description is also a description, a description. It too puts the Holy One, blessed be He, into a group. All those who are not cruel. No, but an abstracting description can do that—association. No, an abstracting description is not a description. I say: after you really clear away everything, you are no longer left with descriptions. That is exactly the point. Meaning, precisely that is what I am saying: this is another proof that the negation under discussion here is not oppositional negation. Because oppositional negation will not solve the problem of association—it is the same thing. Just as a positive attribute involves association, so too a negative attribute involves association—meaning, oppositional negation. “And we must first explain to you how negations are attributes in one respect, and in what way they differ from affirmative attributes.” So what is the difference between negative and positive attributes? “And afterward I will explain to you how we have no way of describing Him except through negations and not otherwise.” First he will explain the difference between positive and negative attributes, and afterwards he will explain why only negative ones belong with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He. “And I say that an attribute is not that which singles out the thing described alone, such that it shares that attribute with nothing else.” An attribute does not single out one object alone in such a way that it is not shared with anything else. “Rather, an attribute is indeed an attribute of the thing described, even if it is shared with something else, and there is no individuation in it.” The language here is a bit less clear than in Schwartz, where it is more lucid. But what he means is that an attribute places you into a group, what I said earlier. It does not individuate you; it places you into a whole group of people or objects that have that description. “For example, if you saw a man from afar and asked and said: What is that thing seen? And they said to you: a living creature.” You ask what are we seeing here? You see a person from afar. You ask who we see here. He says: a human, a living creature. That is a correct description, okay? But it does not individuate. “This will undoubtedly be a description of the thing seen.” Meaning, that is indeed one of its attributes: it is a living being. “Even though it does not single it out from all the others.” But it puts it into a very broad group. Broad—it does not individuate it. “Rather, it has attained some small individuation, namely that the thing seen is not a body from the species of plants nor from the species of…” I don’t know what that means here; maybe birds. No, perhaps inanimate things. Inanimate things he calls minerals. But a bird is also a living being. Here it translates it: “it is not a body from the class of plants nor from the class of minerals.” “And similarly, if you know that there is in this house one body and you know that in it there is one body, but you do not know what it is, and you ask and say: What is in this house? And the answer is: there is no mineral in it, nor plant.” Then you have reached some individuation by it, and you know there is a living being in it, even if you do not know which living being it is. “In this respect negative attributes are like affirmative attributes, in that they cannot fail to individuate somewhat.” Both negative and positive attributes make some sort of individuation—not full individuation. “Even though the individuation they contain is only the removal of what they negate from among what we would have thought not to be negated.” “But the respect in which negative attributes differ from affirmative attributes is that affirmative attributes, although they do not individuate, indicate some part of the thing whose knowledge we seek, whether a part of its essence or an accident among its accidents. Negative attributes, however, in no way inform us of anything about the essence whose knowledge we seek—except incidentally, as in the examples we gave.” What is he saying here, basically? That both positive and negative attributes produce some partial individuation. Meaning, when you say something about this object, you have individuated it a bit. You have said what it is and what it is not; you have related it to a certain group and not to another group. But that is shared by both positive and negative attributes. You said one thing. What? You said it is alive. And there are many living beings, and also within the species of living beings there are many specific living creatures. Fine. So you individuated it somewhat but not completely. But that is true of both positive and negative attributes. So what is the difference anyway? With positive attributes I individuate something in it. With negative attributes I individuate somewhat with regard to what it is not, not what it is. Both give me partial information about that object, or partial individuation, but this gives me information about it, while that gives me information about what is outside it, about what it is not. That is the difference between positive and negative attributes. Negative description leaves you with all the remaining things; it’s like “go.” Right. I’ll come to that later—he uses it very creatively. Right. According to these lines it sounds as though he is talking about negation of opposition. Right, but with negation of opposition it really seems meaningless. But we’ll see later. I think within his own words themselves you can see that here he uses the concept of negation—there is no choice but to interpret it this way. There is no choice, because otherwise it is meaningless. But no, you also see later some expressions that suggest this. I already… it won’t be today. Fine, let’s stop here.