Reuven Interviews 002: Interview with Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham — Marxism, Postmodernism, and Current Issues – Reuven Seidler
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Opening and introduction of Rabbi Michael Abraham
- Defining postmodernism versus modernism and classicism
- Postmodernism as denial of standards
- David Hume: empiricism, skepticism, and causality
- Kant and the lack of a satisfactory solution to Hume’s challenge
- The move to postmodernity out of Hume’s challenge
- Political correctness and the contradiction of postmodernity as both inclusive and non-inclusive
- Marxism: absolute truth and a methodology of exposing interests
- Postmodernity as a distillation of the Marxist methodology against Marxism itself
- Why postmodernism emerges specifically in modern times
- The postmodern utopia and the totalitarianism that follows from it
- Method as the supreme value and the golem that rose against its creator
- Critique of postmodern “proofs” and begging the question
- Basic assumptions, and the postmodern attitude toward exposing them
- Marxism as the historical crystallization of subversive suspicion
- Contemporary reaction and a synthetic alternative
- Truth, openness, and the distinction between “you’re mistaken” and “you’re an idiot”
- Justifying the concept of truth: intuition as cognition and not as thinking
- God as justification for the reliability of cognition
- An alternative attempt via suffering, survival, and evolution—and its rejection
- Closing the conversation
Summary
General Overview
The conversation introduces Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham and his books, and then develops a definition of postmodernism as a reaction to modernism that denies the existence of objective standards for truth, goodness, and beauty. Rabbi Abraham connects the root of the postmodern spiral to David Hume’s challenges regarding causality and generalization, arguing that no satisfactory philosophical solution has been found throughout history, and explains how the Marxist methodology of exposing interests and subversion carries over into postmodernity even though it rejects absolute truth. He then describes how postmodernism becomes, in practice, totalitarian because of its dependence on universal agreement, and how a public reaction emerges that seeks a conservative-synthetic alternative that recognizes truth without absolute certainty and with openness to discussion. Finally, Rabbi Abraham proposes an epistemological solution through intuitive cognition in the style of “the eyes of the intellect,” and argues that without God it is difficult to justify the reliability of cognition, rejecting attempts to justify truth through survival and suffering or through evolution.
Opening and introduction of Rabbi Michael Abraham
The interviewer introduces Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham as someone with a Wikipedia entry, as a graduate of prestigious Haredi kollels including the Chazon Ish kollel, and as someone who completed a PhD in theoretical physics with distinction. The interviewer describes Rabbi Abraham’s writing in philosophy and Judaism and mentions a response book to Richard Dawkins called God Plays Dice. The interviewer connects this to an earlier conversation with Dr. Ephraim Podoksik about Marxism and oppression, and asks to begin with the relationship between Marxism and postmodernism, drawing on Rabbi Abraham’s book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon.
Defining postmodernism versus modernism and classicism
Rabbi Abraham defines postmodernity as a collection of phenomena in art criticism, social criticism, and interpretation, and suggests seeing it as a backlash against modernism. Rabbi Abraham presents modernism as the view that the world is progressing and that there is a role in advancing it, and classifies communism and Marxism as modernist conceptions. He sets against this classicism, as the view that the past was ideal, and emphasizes that what modernism and classicism share is agreement that there are criteria for better and worse and for more true and less true, so that their argument is about the direction of progress.
Postmodernism as denial of standards
Rabbi Abraham states that postmodernity comes out against the very existence of standards and denies objective distinctions between truth and falsehood, good and evil, and artistic quality. He describes a position according to which rankings are subjective and depend on the ranker, and therefore there is no valid objective claim that allows comparison between “narratives” or “discourses.” Rabbi Abraham applies this also to social values and economic and political systems, and argues that from this point of view communism and capitalism are not right or wrong but group conventions.
David Hume: empiricism, skepticism, and causality
The interviewer presents David Hume’s challenge according to which we see only a sequence of events and not “cause,” and therefore generalizations and laws are not directly observed. Rabbi Abraham presents Hume as an empiricist who places empirical science as the exclusive tool for knowing the world, and as someone opposed to rationalism, which seeks to learn about the world from reason without observation. He explains that in Hume, trust in observation and skepticism are not contradictory, but stem from the same demand to cling only to what is directly observed, and therefore generalization and causality are called into question because they cannot be observed empirically.
Kant and the lack of a satisfactory solution to Hume’s challenge
Rabbi Abraham says that Hume’s questions have no good answers, and that Kant, who said Hume “awakened him from his dogmatic slumber,” proposed a framework in which we deal with the world as it appears to us—the phenomena—and not with the world in itself—the noumena. Rabbi Abraham argues that Kant’s answer is unsatisfactory because it turns scientific law into a statement about us rather than about the world, and says it still does not explain “why it works.” He notes that when one reviews the historical answers to Hume’s challenge, not one of them holds up, and refers to Hugo Bergmann’s books Thinkers of the Generation and Introduction to Epistemology, and to the chapter “The Foolishness of the World.”
The move to postmodernity out of Hume’s challenge
Rabbi Abraham proposes a reconstruction according to which postmodernity begins from the recognition that there is no satisfactory philosophical answer to Hume’s challenge, and therefore every claim about the world becomes, in practice, a statement about the speaker or about the speaker’s group. He describes this as recognizing that people are trapped within a discourse and narrative, within a conceptual framework, and that we should stop deceiving ourselves as though we live “outside the bubble.” The interviewer presents this as a relaxed and inclusive position, and then raises the tension between such pluralism and phenomena of banning statements and marking boundaries in public discourse.
Political correctness and the contradiction of postmodernity as both inclusive and non-inclusive
Rabbi Abraham argues that postmodernity includes everyone only so long as they are not making claims about the world, but remain within subjective meaning, and so it allows “chatter” that commits to nothing. He says that the moment a person tries to make a claim with validity, postmodernity turns against him intolerantly because it holds that nothing can really be claimed. He presents this as foam on the waves and connects the deeper explanation to Marxism.
Marxism: absolute truth and a methodology of exposing interests
Rabbi Abraham presents Marxism as a thoroughly modernist movement, with a division between good and evil and truth and falsehood, and defines it as a distilled expression of modernism. He distinguishes between philosophical Marxism, which holds to absolute truth, and Marxism as a methodology, which replaces substantive argument with exposure of interests, schemes, and subversion, sometimes even without the agent’s own awareness. He describes a reduction to economic interests, power, class, and hegemony, and the license to use those same tools on the grounds that the opponent is doing so anyway, under the assumption that the end justifies the means.
Postmodernity as a distillation of the Marxist methodology against Marxism itself
Rabbi Abraham says that postmodernity fully adopts the Marxist methodological aspect of exposing interests, but sharply opposes the philosophical aspect of one truth. He describes how Marxists analyze mainly their opponents in a subversive way, whereas postmodernists apply that same analysis to the Marxists themselves and pull the rug out from under absolute truth. He concludes that the destructive methodology remains alone and becomes postmodernity, and therefore postmodernity is a product of modernism and not only a war against it.
Why postmodernism emerges specifically in modern times
The interviewer asks how postmodernity appeared “specifically now” if modernist patterns have existed for thousands of years. Rabbi Abraham says such historical explanations are always ad hoc, but suggests in hindsight that the opening of the world and encounters with other groups undermine confidence in exclusive truth. He mentions exposure to other conceptions, the global village, non-Euclidean geometries, and relativity theory as strengthening awareness of multiple frames of reference, and adds that secularization and the “death of God” remove an anchor that made it possible to attribute absolute truth to a higher point of view.
The postmodern utopia and the totalitarianism that follows from it
The interviewer points to postmodern appearances that seem utopian, such as a feminist description of leaving an oppressive patriarchal club. Rabbi Abraham presents the postmodern utopia as a “vacuum” in which no one makes claims, and therefore there is no oppression because there are no judgments between truth and falsehood. He argues that this utopia can be realized only if everyone accepts it, and therefore it is “all or nothing” and leads to a totalitarian struggle against whoever is not postmodern, mentioning the “fax problem” as an illustration of the need for an all-encompassing community.
Method as the supreme value and the golem that rose against its creator
Rabbi Abraham argues that postmodernism empties the world of values and is left only with methodology, and then methodology itself becomes the supreme value for which people fight. He describes how “good guys and bad guys” arise again around loyalty to the postmodern method, and how postmodern literature focuses on theory and method instead of content. He says postmodern texts are full of nonsense, and proposes a test according to which they are made up of arguments that can be translated into modernist language plus nonsense, and their quality is measured by the proportion of the first part.
Critique of postmodern “proofs” and begging the question
The interviewer raises the example of Foucault and the claim that madness is a social construction, suggesting that there is something there to prove and write about. Rabbi Abraham argues that postmodern discourse holds a “basket of schemes” and interprets phenomena as necessarily the product of interest, while begging the question, as in automatically identifying profit with motive. He argues that examples of cultural differences are not proof but interpretation, and that they can also be interpreted as the difference between error and knowledge, so there is no logical resolution here.
Basic assumptions, and the postmodern attitude toward exposing them
Rabbi Abraham says that in postmodern discourse, the very act of pointing out basic assumptions is treated as an argument against a position, without any discussion of whether the assumptions are reasonable. He argues that every argument rests on basic assumptions, and therefore turning their very existence into a disqualification is, in his view, ridiculous. He sharpens the point by saying that such an attack leads to radical skepticism that many people use selectively only when it suits them.
Marxism as the historical crystallization of subversive suspicion
Rabbi Abraham agrees that the claim “the other person is stupid or wicked” exists in various traditions, but says that the dimension of scheme and interest as systematic analysis crystallized especially in Marxism, in terms such as “false consciousness.” He argues that subversive thinking existed in earlier forms, including examples from Torah discourse, but Marxism distilled and deepened it until it became a clear methodology out of which postmodernity emerged.
Contemporary reaction and a synthetic alternative
The interviewer describes contemporary everyday beliefs as derivatives of deep philosophy, and gives the example of multiple genders as suited to a subjectivist conception. Rabbi Abraham says that in his book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon he anticipated the possibility of a public reaction to postmodern brainwashing, because many people sense certain truths and are unwilling to see everything as subjective construction. He describes a “synthetic” alternative that allows even a sophisticated person to remain faithful to intuitions, and adds that there is a conservative intellectual avant-garde that supports this movement even if it is not given a public platform.
Truth, openness, and the distinction between “you’re mistaken” and “you’re an idiot”
Rabbi Abraham rejects the claim that saying someone is mistaken necessarily implies arrogance, and distinguishes between haughty certainty and provisional judgment in light of arguments and evidence. He argues that a position that believes in truth requires openness and weighing the other side’s arguments in order to determine that they are wrong, and emphasizes the possibility of personal error while still holding to what seems right at present. He describes a public confusion in which people fight for truth but are still influenced by “postmodern leftovers” that prevent them from simply saying, “I’m right and the other person is wrong.”
Justifying the concept of truth: intuition as cognition and not as thinking
The interviewer asks for a justification for the existence of the concept of truth and mentions Wittgenstein as someone who challenged its use. Rabbi Abraham takes the problem back to the root of Hume’s challenges and argues that the root is the dichotomy between sensory cognition and thinking, a dichotomy Hume posits and Kant adopts. He proposes that there is “cognition” that is not only direct sensation but also intuition—the “eyes of the intellect”—such as seeing the law of gravity from observations, and argues that without accepting this kind of cognition there is no way to avoid postmodernism.
God as justification for the reliability of cognition
The interviewer asks why belief in God is required after the possibility of intuitive cognition has been presented. Rabbi Abraham argues that if a human being is only a physical-material product, without a non-material dimension, there is no real basis for the optimistic assumption that cognition and thought are reliable and fit reality. He says that belief in the reliability of cognitive mechanisms hints at the assumption of some factor that saw to it, and presents this as a reasonable dependence in the subtext, even though the discussion of how we know that is a separate one.
An alternative attempt via suffering, survival, and evolution—and its rejection
The interviewer proposes an argument attributed to Jordan Peterson, according to which everyone believes in suffering and in avoiding it, and therefore interpretations that aid survival are “truer.” Rabbi Abraham says the argument is weak and begs the question, and that one can answer it out of the same radical skepticism it seeks to attack. He adds that relying on evolution to justify the reliability of thought cannot work, because evolutionary theory itself relies on the same thought that one is trying to justify, and therefore it is a circular argument.
Closing the conversation
The interviewer concludes that the discussion was fascinating and thanks Rabbi Abraham for his time. He notes that Rabbi Abraham teaches at Bar-Ilan in the Institute for Advanced Torah Studies and expresses a desire for more conversations. The discussion ends with mutual farewell.
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] Okay, we’re live. Excellent. We’re not actually live, but afterward I’ll upload this to YouTube. So I’m saying hello to Rabbi Michael Abraham, Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham. And there’s a Wikipedia entry about you, so you can pull out relatively interesting information that way. I don’t remember exactly where you were born. You studied in several very prestigious Haredi kollels, among them the Chazon Ish kollel. As of now you have a degree—you completed a PhD in theoretical physics with distinction. You wrote several books dealing with philosophy and Judaism, generally speaking, and one book that is a response to Richard Dawkins’ book, if I’m not mistaken, called God Plays Dice, on evolution and religion, more or less. So we’ve begun. What you discussed last time with Dr. Ephraim Podoksik was a conversation that dealt more with—it had more of a historical context—it was about Marxism and oppression, a conversation in a historical context, and it was very interesting. And I don’t know if this is a direct connection, but I want to make that connection and start talking with you about postmodernism and also about Marxism. So I read parts of it—I once read, I think, your whole book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon, and now I reread parts of it so I’d come prepared for the conversation. And you identify—let me ask you first—what exactly is postmodernism, or what lies at the basis of that outlook?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, this is a complex phenomenon, and really seeing it as a kind of philosophy is an abstraction. Concretely, we’re talking about phenomena, a collection of phenomena related to art criticism, social criticism, forms of interpretation. But if we still try to make some general abstraction, then it seems to me that postmodernity is some kind of reaction, a backlash against modernism. That is, modernism is a certain conception that says the world is progressing. Yes, say communism—you mentioned Marxism earlier—it was a conception that in its essence was modernist, because it saw the world as progressing, and our role as advancing it, bringing it to a better state, and that’s the essence of modernism. Now, this modernism can be denied on two planes. On the direct and simpler plane, it can be denied by what’s called a classicist conception. A classicist conception is one that says specifically the past was ideal, was perfect. Yes, in Renaissance art they tried to imitate the classical art of Greece, Hellenistic art.
[Speaker A] Which I think exists in Judaism too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, in Judaism too there’s classicism, and it’s a certain inversion of modernism. But what the two opposites have in common is that both agree that there are criteria for better and worse, or more true and less true.
[Speaker A] Right, it’s like progress—I just want maybe to connect here between better and worse. You once talked about modernism or classicism: they can talk about progress because they have a point of reference. Exactly. And that’s where the better and worse comes in.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Meaning, both classicism and modernism—or anti-modernism and modernism—both agree that there are criteria that determine what is better and what is worse, what is more correct and what is less correct, which world is more advanced, which art is better, which values are more correct, and so on. They argue about the direction of the progress that actually exists in the world today. The dispute is a dispute you could almost call factual. Meaning, the question is what is happening. That’s not really accurate, but only to sharpen the point. Postmodernity goes against the common side of these two ideas. Postmodernity denies the existence of standards. There is no such thing as better and worse, more true and less true, correct values and incorrect values, and this is expressed on all the planes I mentioned earlier and more. Also in art criticism: there is no better art and worse art. There are different kinds, or different narratives, different kinds of discourse, different kinds of creation—but we have no way to rank them against one another, or even if we do, that’s subjective. Meaning, the ranking is a function of the one doing the ranking; there’s no real objective claim here. Any objective claim at all that would be valid—this is a kind of internal discourse for a certain group or a certain person, but it’s not only about art. It’s also true regarding social views, values, communism and capitalism, or I don’t know, any other political or economic method will suffer the same attack. Meaning, it can’t be more correct or less correct; it’s a convention prevailing in a certain group of people, and if they’re happy with it, then good for them. There’s no right and wrong or good and bad here. That’s the nutshell version.
[Speaker A] In your book, Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon, you make several claims. I don’t know how much I want to get into specific philosophers here. You identify postmodernism as a product of modernism.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you—
[Speaker A] And you begin with a very interesting question, a question of the philosopher David Hume, who said that we can’t identify causality. And I was just—let me just present the problem a bit, I don’t know who knows it. The philosopher David Hume said that all science, or at least large parts of science, are based on observation and some process that occurs, and then inferring causality. Suppose—the example you gave, if I’m not mistaken—I put wood into fire and it burns. So I repeat this several times, and then I assume that because I put the wood into the fire, it burned. And then I can know that next time I throw—put wood into fire, it’ll burn again, not on the basis of the previous times alone, but on the basis of saying: okay, that was the cause of the second. And Hume’s challenge is: but I didn’t see the cause. I only saw the chronological order of the events, but I didn’t see the cause. And from here we probably enter into this—but what I’d love to understand from you is how we get from here into a kind of spiral whose far end is postmodernism.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, it is indeed complicated. I’ll try to be as concise as possible. David Hume is a very clear expression of a duality that at first glance is very hard to understand. On the one hand, he is an empiricist, one of the prominent British empiricists. An empiricist means someone who advocates science as the tool—not even the most important one, but the exclusive one—for knowing the world: empirical science. And that’s against rationalism, which held that reason too can teach us something about the world, even a priori, meaning without observation. So the empiricists deny that. Something that is a product of our intellect is subjective. We have no reason to assume it describes the world—like Mark Twain once said, the world doesn’t owe you anything; it was here before you. Meaning, the fact that I think in a certain way does not obligate the world to behave in that way. And so the empiricists basically say: leave aside speculation and the forms of thinking you were born with and that are embedded in you. In the end, look at the world. What you see is what there is. You cannot go beyond what you observed. On one hand, this seems like a very scientific, very optimistic stance, one that can allow us to progress in solid knowledge of the world.
[Speaker A] There’s something interesting here, there’s a division between thought and the senses that’s just very strange.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. I don’t know if it’s very strange. In my eyes it’s actually natural. Meaning, rationalism held that thought can teach us about the world, and the empiricists argue that thought is a function of how our intellect is built. If we want to learn about the world, who says we’re built correctly? We need to observe it in order to see what’s in it.
[Speaker A] Isn’t perception also a function of how our senses are built?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Perception is only the translation. Our senses just do a translation. We look at what’s happening in the world, and it gets colored for us in colors that are a function of our conceptual system and our mode of perception. But what we are coloring is something that exists in the world itself. So yes, everyone who observes uses the glasses he was born with, but he uses those glasses to observe something outside. And in that sense it is objective. Now true, we’ll use our own language to describe that objective reality, and there’s no avoiding that. Kant basically sharpened that point, but I think it was fairly clear even before him. So that’s one side we find in David Hume. The second side we find in David Hume is skepticism, which is something I wouldn’t expect from someone so optimistic, someone who believes in scientific progress and empirical observation. David Hume cast doubt on several things that seem obvious to us, and certainly in his time they seemed obvious, like the most basic generalizations we make, such as the assumption that if I see something causing something else, then one can establish a causal relation between them, things of that sort. And the question is: what is the relation between these two aspects in Hume’s doctrine? On the one hand, trust in observation as a scientific tool for progress, and on the other hand, very great skepticism. When you think about it more, you understand these are not contradictory things. They are two sides of the same coin. Because if you really want to be faithful to your empiricist stance, then you have to stick only to what you saw. After all, you went out exactly against the rationalists—the rationalists who take their forms of thought and assume there is some correlation between them and the world. Meaning, that this is how things must be in the world itself too. The empiricist, who denies that, if he wants to be honest, has to stick only to what he sees directly, and nothing more. Meaning, anything beyond that—if he wants to be consistent and honest—he ought to doubt. And therefore consistent empiricism, honest empiricism, is supposed to be very, very skeptical toward anything you did not see directly. Among other things, generalizations, for example. When we see several certain facts and build on their basis a scientific generalization, we saw the facts, and the empiricist does not doubt that. But the generalization is a product of our form of thinking; one can generalize in various ways. Therefore he ought to doubt that. The same goes for establishing a causal relation between two events. We saw event A, we saw event B, and we even saw that event B came after event A. Who said that event B happened because of event A? That “because” isn’t seen by any empirical tool, and therefore causality too is doubtful for him. The great problem is that David Hume’s questions have no answers. No good answers. Kant said that David Hume awoke him from his dogmatic slumber. And he proposed his own answer to Hume’s questions—how we can nevertheless believe in scientific determinations that include general laws, the product of generalizations, the product of causal analysis. David Hume cast doubt on all of that. And the big question is how we can nevertheless believe in the products of scientific thought, of scientific generalization. So Kant proposed a certain suggestion which, in my opinion, does not stand up—and in the opinion of many others too, not just mine. But what’s more interesting is this, and many people, even people who really deal in philosophy, are not always aware of it: when you survey the answers that were given to this throughout history, not one of them is satisfactory. Meaning, the question remains unresolved. There’s a very nice summary in a book by Hugo Bergmann called Thinkers of the Generation, and also in his book called Introduction to Epistemology. There’s a chapter there, I think chapter nine, called “The Foolishness of the World.”
[Speaker A] I just want for a moment to refer briefly to Kant’s idea. Kant, if I’m not mistaken, spoke about transcendental knowledge, or knowledge external to us. And from what I understood—or at least one solution I understood from him, though I have to admit I only read summaries and not him directly—the claim is that if there are principles so basic that if you don’t believe in them it’s not even clear what you mean when you say “correct.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can put it that way. I think the description isn’t fully accurate.
[Speaker A] Kant—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] basically argues that our thinking and our cognition happen within some framework. A conceptual framework, a framework of categories. And therefore even when we speak about the world itself, we are not really speaking about the world outside, but about the world as it is perceived by us. What he calls the phenomena, the phenomenal world, the world of appearances. And not the world as such, the noumena. Therefore, says Kant, we can indeed make claims by means of thought about the world, because in fact the world we are dealing with is not the world itself but its picture as it exists in us. And about that picture we can indeed say things, because we really can know something about it simply from the fact that it is a picture that exists in us. What I’m claiming—and again, this isn’t the place to expand on it—is that I think this doesn’t really answer Hume’s questions, because in the end he throws out the baby with the bathwater, because Kant basically argues that in truth we can’t really say anything about the world. We can say things about how we will perceive the world. The question is whether we’re satisfied with that when we look at a scientific law. Are we really saying that the scientific law is a statement about us, not about the world? I don’t think that’s right. I think there are good arguments against that. But there are no good arguments explaining why this works. That remains. Hume’s challenges still remain open. As I mentioned earlier, Hugo Bergmann really goes answer by answer through the responses that were given to this throughout history, and in the end he says: no answer is satisfactory. The most fundamental question of epistemology—the theory of knowledge—remains without a philosophical answer. Many people who criticize Kant don’t notice—you know, there’s a feeling about philosophy that philosophy, okay, has many opinions and there’s no way to decide, and everyone has his own view, and therefore many people say there’s no point in dealing with it. I think this is a wonderful example of why that’s not true. There aren’t many opinions—there isn’t even one opinion that holds water. Meaning, many people proposed various suggestions; not one of them holds water. And I think that’s a very interesting and non-trivial philosophical result. Our most basic ability to know the world is basically under a very big question mark. Now if we come with this question—you asked how this leads to postmodernity? Exactly. Postmodernity begins here. Again, this is my reconstruction, but I think it’s correct. It describes the deeper process behind the move from modernism to postmodernity. Postmodernity basically says: okay, so if there’s no answer, then in fact we can’t accept it. And everything we think about the world, about people, about groups, about ideas—all of that is really a statement about us. It cannot really count as a claim about the world. And if that’s so, then let’s at least put things on the table and admit it, and stop fooling ourselves that we really live outside the bubble we’re living in. We live within some narrative discourse, in postmodern language, that imprisons us within some conceptual framework, some mental framework, and it’s good that we be aware of it. It’s very—
[Speaker A] interesting. So that’s very interesting, what you’re saying, because when you present it this way—when you present the postmodern position, it’s a very relaxed position. It’s a position that comes and says: I include everyone. But what’s very interesting is that in practice we often see—I often see, at least—the connection between actions, say—let’s start here. There’s a concept called political correctness, which says you’re not allowed to say certain things, or maybe you’re not even allowed to think certain things. And if I’m not mistaken, you once connected it to postmodernism. But there’s a tension here that needs clarifying, because when you present postmodernism, you present a position that is very accepting and very inclusive, saying that everyone is basically making statements—sort of declarations—about themselves. But then you’re not allowed to say this, and you’re not allowed to say that, and you’re not allowed to say this, and you’re not allowed to say that. And that’s a contradiction, basically. Somewhere there’s a tension between these two positions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. This too requires somewhat extended treatment, but I’ll say it in a few words, and afterward if you want we can go back and deal with it more systematically. Postmodernity basically forbids speech as long as it isn’t in a subjective sense. Meaning, if you could note next to the word “Negro” that this is only the way you see it, maybe they’d grant it legitimacy. The moment you make some claim about the world, you’re not allowed to say it. Postmodernity includes everyone as long as they say nothing. Anyone who tries to say something will in no way be accepted by postmodernity. They include everyone only in the sense that they allow everyone to chatter, because their chatter, in any case, has no meaning. But the moment he wants to do something with it, to claim something by means of it, then he comes out frontally against postmodernity, which says that nothing can be claimed. And then of course he will find himself under crossfire, under a very strong and very non-inclusive and intolerant attack. But I’m saying: that’s the foam on the waves. I think if we want to go back a bit and understand this more deeply, there’s something here connected to what we perhaps discussed in the preparatory conversation about Marxism. Here the Marxist question comes into the picture. In fact, after we spoke I remembered that I wrote a series of posts about this on my website. I think you can read there—it’s very interesting—from post 178 onward. Whoever wants can read it there. I think it’s a line of thought definitely worth attention. I’ll say it briefly. Marxism—a blatantly modernist movement, as I said at the beginning, a movement that aspired to change the world, improve it—it believed very clearly in good and evil, there is better and worse, there are the good guys and the bad guys. Children of light and children of darkness. Very sharp and very clear. Distinctly modernist. It seems to me the most distilled expression of modernism is Marxism. But Marxism has two characteristics. One characteristic is the philosophical characteristic, which I just described. The characteristic of absolute truth, good guys and bad guys, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, those who are right and those who are wrong. The second characteristic, related to the first, concerns methodology. Marxist methodology—when they make an argument, generally they won’t make an argument that substantiates their position or negates the other position. That’s not—or at least that’s not what’s called Marxism. You can find such arguments; that’s Marxist philosophy. Marxism is something else—Marxism as methodology. Marxism as methodology is the exposure of subversive tendencies. Meaning, when someone promotes a certain value or ideology, clearly there is an interest sitting behind it. Some subversive scheme that he doesn’t state explicitly and sometimes may not even be aware of. Meaning, it could be that he himself isn’t aware of it. But the Marxist knows everything; he always exposes it, he knows everything. Meaning, we are not always aware of what we think, but they know everything. And so Marxism in the methodological sense is mainly this thing: exposing the deeper dimensions of the processes we observe. What really, really drives them. Not what people think drives them, or what people believe in, but what causes them to believe what they believe. And therefore very often this gets reduced to economic interests, to interests of power and class. And therefore Marxists also permit themselves to use those same tools. Because those who oppose us speak in the name of values, but really they’re advancing interests—or class or power, hegemony. So we too will do the same. But we’ll do it openly. We’ll use force, and we’ll put our conceptions on the table, and of course the end justifies the means. And therefore Marxism as methodology is dealing with an idea not through arguments, but by going below the belt. What is really motivating you? Don’t tell me stories that you believe in freedom. You don’t believe in freedom. You know freedom will give you the ability to make more money. Concepts, arguments that we hear there even today, all the time, about the rich—what do they call them today? The upper class, I don’t know? The tycoons. The tycoons. A tycoon is always synonymous with an interested party who never does anything for substantive reasons, but everything is for self-interest. Now, I’m not a tycoon and don’t know tycoons, but that way of thinking is a Marxist way of thinking. Because the claim is that if you benefit from something, that’s proof that that’s why you did it. Meaning, it can’t be a side effect. You didn’t act for—
[Speaker A] Because here—I just want again to connect this to postmodernism—because once the reduction is only to what the individual thinks and feels and perceives, it becomes very hard to see him as stepping outside his interests. And therefore everything he thinks and feels and perceives is simply in accordance with his interests.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but you’ve already jumped to the end. I still need a few more steps on the way from Marxism until I get there.
[Speaker A] Go ahead.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So in Marxism, we said that if so, there are two characteristics. One characteristic is a philosophical one, and from that standpoint it is clearly modernist. The truth is with us, everyone else is wrong, and we need to fight for the truth, to advance the world—modernism in its pure form. The methodological element or aspect is the subversive aspect. Okay. Now, postmodernism fully adopts the methodological aspect. But it strongly opposes the philosophical aspect. Meaning, there is no truth, no one is more right than anyone else. That is obviously against Marxism. Postmodernism does not believe in absolute truth, in a better world, in an objective definition of what is more right or better or less so. But in the methodological aspect, it seems to me that postmodernism distilled and brought to full realization Marxism—the outlook of subversion that lies behind every process and every mode of thinking. And this is really a fascinating process of ideas unfolding, of how ideas develop. Because after all, postmodernism and Marxism stand on opposite sides of the barricade in the most extreme way possible. Marxism believes… in one absolute truth and none besides it, and anyone who opposes it should be killed while he is still small. And postmodernism doesn’t believe that at all, but it draws its methodology entirely from Marxism and interprets everything going on around it in terms of interests, subversion, striving to accumulate positions of power, and so on. And of course, exactly like the Marxists, they say okay, if everyone does this then we’ll do it too, but we’re also aware of what we’re doing, because the others often aren’t even aware of it themselves; it’s not always a conscious mission. And therefore we are aware of it, we are smarter than everyone else, we put it on the table. So when I, as a postmodernist, make a claim, don’t even take me seriously—I’m advancing an interest, I’m telling you openly that I’m doing it in order to advance an interest. Even if you catch me in contradictions, my grandmother couldn’t care less—because in the end the goal is to advance an interest. So the Marxist methodology was fully adopted by postmodernism, but there is one very interesting point of difference, because the Marxists analyzed mainly their opponents in a Marxist way. Because after all, the truth is with them, and the others are just idiots, the others, you don’t
[Speaker A] say about yourself that you have false consciousness; you say about the one who opposes you that he has false consciousness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Meaning, the Marxists say, look, the person standing opposite me is one of two things: either he’s an idiot or he’s wicked. Right? He’s wrong—that’s obvious that he’s wrong, because the pure truth is with me. Now, why is he acting in favor of something that is obviously untrue and unfair, unjust, immoral? One of two things: either he’s an idiot—but fine, dealing with idiots isn’t much of a challenge, so he’s probably smart. If he’s smart, then how does he not understand? He has an interest. He’s simply acting for the sake of that interest. And therefore they analyze their opponents subversively. Now the postmodernists come along, adopt the Marxists’ methodology, and say, wait a second, my Marxist friends—and what about you yourselves? After all, if there really is no truth, if everything is interests, then where does your own idea come from? And so they say, forget it, we’re pulling the ground out from under it. Meaning, the Marxist methodology destroys the Marxist philosophy. And what we are left with is only methodology. A destructive methodology, a deconstructive methodology. And that is postmodernism. Postmodernism is basically—and that’s why I argue that it is an offspring of modernism and not just a war against it. It takes modernism and says to it: okay, let’s draw the conclusions that arise from your method.
[Speaker A] But this is Marxist modernism that you’re talking about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. But Marxism is almost the essence of modernism—of course an extreme essence, like everything else. But it really is the essence of modernism. Anything beyond that is not completely modernist. Because modernism means believing in more correct and less correct.
[Speaker A] Yes, but there are many kinds of more correct and less correct.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it doesn’t matter, but each person, relative to what he sees as correct—that is the correct thing and there is none besides it. The fact that others think that what is correct is something else means they are wrong. What does that have to do with anything?
[Speaker A] Yes, so okay, I understand. So that’s also true of all the other ideologies, whether ideological or religious, that like Marxism say about those who oppose them that they are either stupid or wicked.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, and we know that from our own neighborhoods, right? Yes, yes. In the halakhic world, in the Torah world, how do they analyze other approaches? Either they’re idiots or they’re wicked—what else could they be? It can’t be that there is someone here who genuinely disagrees with me, because the pure truth is with me.
[Speaker A] Rabbi Elchanan says this about “do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes.” He says this is heresy. Yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So—
[Speaker A] He says why, why does it need to say that? It should have said after your opinions. So he says no, because intellectually it is obvious that we are right; rather, if the evil inclination seduces you, then apparently you are wicked.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That already goes back to the Sages: “Israel sinned only in order to permit themselves sexual immorality.” Meaning, it’s obvious. So again, this is a Marxist outlook. Every position that is modernist, that believes in truth seriously, in a committed way, is almost doomed to be Marxist in the methodological sense. But then the postmodernists come along and, seemingly rightly, say: friends, first correct yourselves. Meaning, if you accuse everyone else of really being driven by interests, who says you are not like that? After all, everyone is driven.
[Speaker A] But here I have two questions that I want—we’re rolling this along nicely, I think. There are two questions I want to get into. First of all, since Marxism is so extreme, it’s really not clear why we arrived specifically now at postmodernity, because already—well, I have two questions. The first question is how did we arrive specifically now at postmodernism if modernist conceptions had already existed for two thousand years and no one cried out? So we need to think about how suddenly this fellow appears and becomes reflective and says, wait a second, you yourselves can also be this way. Whether they’re not religious or whatever—but come on, do you understand my question? Yes, I understand. It’s as if, if that’s what you’re saying, the Sages were modernists, the Sages were modernists, the knights in the Middle Ages were also modernists, and the Marxists too—they all hold one ideology: whoever is against them is either wicked or foolish. And it’s as if either to destroy the wicked and take the fools and teach them understanding. But what is happening now that suddenly we became smarter and suddenly some guys from outer space came and told us, wait, you yourselves also need to be reflective? Where—how does that happen?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This kind of explanation in history, or cultural history, or the history of philosophy, is always ad hoc. If you had asked someone in the tenth century when this would happen, no one could have predicted that it would happen in the twentieth century, in the middle of the twentieth century. Come on, come on, come on. In hindsight, once it happened, you can see a few fingerprints or offer explanations for why it happened and how it happened. For example, the moment you see that in a closed world, in a world where you live in a Jewish world and you don’t really know others, then it’s easy for you to understand that you are the only one who is right and everyone else is wrong and there is only one truth. In a world where suddenly you are exposed to other people, you see that they too are intelligent people, they have their own assumptions, with their own views and arguments, perhaps no less persuasive than yours, suddenly you say, wait a second, so what does it mean that this absolute truth is with me and he also thinks that absolute truth is with him? Then you say, wait a second—maybe all of us are living in a movie. And then, for example, developments in mathematics such as non-Euclidean geometries, the theory of relativity showing you that there are different frames of reference that see the world in different ways, greatly helped the penny drop for people—that they say, wait a second, we are very sure of our truth, but notice: others are no less sure of theirs. And when you live in a more open world, certainly in a global village like today—and we’re talking about even a hundred years ago.
[Speaker A] But that’s a technological explanation, isn’t it? It’s an explanation that’s somewhat technological.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I don’t think so. A hundred years ago too, an airplane is technology, a ship is technology. The moment there is more contact between groups, the moment you don’t live inside the bubble of the village where you were born until you die, but you also meet other groups—
[Speaker A] It’s still an explanation that emphasizes technological processes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, true. This encounter is what basically says to you: wait a second, let’s try to look at myself from the outside the way the other sees me—
[Speaker A] Like—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the way I see him, really, he sees me. And then wait a second—who says that this absolute truth I’m so convinced of, who says it isn’t some construction of my own and my group’s subjective discourse, exactly the way I accuse everyone else?
[Speaker A] Yes. So here, here it gets interesting because, for example, I thought of a person who identified postmodernism not as ad hoc—or at least, you could say, who was right on the border of it—Nietzsche. There’s a really beautiful paragraph in Nietzsche, in The Gay Science I think, about the death of God. And he says that we are falling upward and downward and in every direction—he really nails the point. We have lost our point of reference for everything. Now here you could say it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. It could be that the death of God is a death produced as a result of encounter with technological development—or not, or maybe it starts there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think here it’s hard to establish cause and effect; it goes back and forth. Part of it is secularization, the death of God in the sense of secularization. Nietzsche, by the way, was not speaking specifically about secularization; he really spoke about the death of the intellectual point of reference. But secularization too, in the classic religious sense, is part of the story, because God gives you some anchor by which you can say, okay, the pure truth is with me, because God sees everything from His vantage point. I am only a human being, but He knows everything. Once we no longer have that, it becomes much easier to arrive at a more pluralistic position, a position that sees a multiplicity of views, and then I say okay, so what I think too is really just one discourse among many possible different narratives. And there are complex reasons why this happened specifically now, and I’m not even sure—it could have happened in the fifteenth century or maybe in the twenty-fifth century, I have no idea. It happened now. But at some point, I believe, it had to happen.
[Speaker A] Now there’s another thing here, because we’ve been talking now about postmodernism, which comes and supposedly does a very thorough job and reaches the Marxists and all the modernist doctrines and tells them: you yourselves also come from one point of reference. And on that basis it basically undermines all the other conceptions. But this is very interesting, because at least in its manifestations in the world—in its manifestations in the world, that is, if we look for example… they all see a utopia. They have a kind of thinking, or at least they dress themselves in utopian thinking. So for example among feminists you can hear that we live in some horrible, dreadful patriarchal club where men oppress themselves and women and everyone else, and we only need to get out of there and things will be good. But that’s strange, because according to postmodernism there is no such thing. Is this just—I think maybe it’s a psychological tension, maybe you just can’t contain the position, meaning again, simply—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, the point is that the utopian world is the great vacuum, and everyone is fighting for the realization of the great vacuum. Vacuum means a world in which no one makes any claim. Then of course there is no problem of feminism and no problem of chauvinism, because neither men will claim that they are superior nor women will claim that they are superior; no one will claim anything, and automatically the wolf shall dwell with the lamb—that is the postmodern vision. And therefore very often the postmodern vision rests on a moral platform, because it says that all forms of oppression and violence in the world are rooted in a kind of chauvinistic thinking that says: I am right and the other is wrong, or I am good and the other is bad. If we get rid of that, everything will be wonderful. So it sounds like a positive statement, but at root it is a negative statement. There is some hope here that once absolute negation takes over the world and no one claims anything, we will all live in peace and tranquility. And what has of course been argued against this conception is: how exactly will you live in peace and tranquility? For tango it takes two—or nine billion, meaning all the inhabitants of this globe.
[Speaker A] And if—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] you are postmodern and live in peace and tranquility with your two neighbors, but the enemy across the border is not postmodern, then either you will have to contain him—and that will end your career—or you will have to give up your postmodernism. Meaning, if you succeed—this is the fax problem. Do you know the fax problem? No. The fax problem says: the person who invented the fax machine, how does he sell the first fax? After all, nobody will buy the first fax, because to whom will he send faxes? Right, okay. Meaning, in order to operate a fax you need a community. Right, right.
[Speaker A] And it’s not for one person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Any invention like that—like the internet—any invention that requires a community is hard to bootstrap. Here I’m saying it’s a similar phenomenon. In order for postmodernism to work, it can only work where everyone has already accepted it.
[Speaker A] Yes, but the postmodernist can tell you: I’m striving toward that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No problem, you can strive toward that,
[Speaker A] but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] postmodernism has a utopia that can be realized only if everyone accepts it. Meaning, this is a utopia where it cannot be that a community of a hundred people or ten thousand people decides, we want to establish a utopia for ourselves. Either the whole world is party to this deal, or it’s not workable. Very good.
[Speaker A] What? Yes, no, because as you’re speaking it seems to me this connects a few things that maybe need attention. So now, as if, we’re moving—I keep moving from the philosophical plane to the supposedly earthly plane—so this very much explains why it is so totalitarian, or why it is—because it has to be, because it has to be, because otherwise yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You have to persecute anyone who isn’t like that, because if there is even one person who isn’t, it ruins the whole world.
[Speaker A] Exactly, and it also endangers everyone, it endangers everyone too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s exactly the whole idea. You know, if you are promoting another idea, say communism—even if not the whole world becomes communist, it’s not terrible. There can be a kibbutz of a thousand people living cooperatively. Very nice. Yes, everything is fine. But postmodernism can’t work that way. Postmodernism is either all or nothing. Meaning, if there is someone who doesn’t agree with it, then you have to fight him to the bitter end, or persuade him, or I don’t know what. And then the wondrous miracle of the postmodern world happens, in which postmodernism itself becomes an idea or a utopia for which one fights. Meaning, what they came to negate ends up turning against them. The golem rises against its maker. They gave up all values and ideas, were left only with methodology—which they drew from Marxism—and now the methodology itself has become the supreme value. Meaning, now they fight—they emptied the world of values, were left with methodology, but the next stage of the process is that the methodology itself becomes a value, and now the war is a war over method. Meaning, whoever does not use the postmodern method or deconstruction or whatever aspect in art or whatever it may be—he is the enemy. And now there are already enemies, there are already bad guys and good guys, and we’re back where we started. Meaning, ironically, sometimes I feel there is a philosophical explanation for this, the one I just gave. In other contexts you can see it on the psychological plane—you hinted at it a sentence ago—it is hard to live in a world in which… a person has to have some value for which he fights. So where all values have been emptied out and only methodology remains, then methodology will be the value for which I fight. But that is a low-level explanation. Meaning, it’s an explanation that says, okay, they are weak, psychologically they can’t cope with a world without values, so they generate values out of thin air. I gave earlier an explanation that is philosophical, not psychological. And that is that here you really have to impose the vacuum on the whole world, because a vacuum cannot exist. There is diffusion, you know: if there is a part with a vacuum and a part without a vacuum in a syringe—if there is a part with a vacuum and a part without a vacuum—then there will be diffusion and the vacuum will disappear. The vacuum has to be in the whole world. And then what happens is, you can really see this, for example, in postmodern literature of all kinds.
[Speaker A] Can you move that a little to the left so we can see?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes. Postmodern literature of all kinds, their journals, everything—it is always about theory, method. Theory and Criticism, the Israeli journal, yes, the postmodern one. Right. Or about method. Everything, all that literature deals with theory, with method, never with the idea itself. Meaning, there is no idea. Theory and method are the idea. That distinction is decisive, because there is no idea, no content, only methods. So the method becomes the idea for which one fights, about which one writes. Of course in the end this is one great vacuum. There’s really nothing to write about. When you read a postmodern text, it is simply a pile of nonsense. It says nothing. Once I said, at some event held in honor of the publication of Rabbi Shagar’s book called Tablets and Broken Tablets, I spoke there that evening, and I said that postmodern literature, every postmodern book, is made up of two components. One component is arguments that can be translated into modernist language—good arguments or less good arguments that can be translated into modernist language. And therefore the use of postmodern language is nonsense. Nonsense just in order to sound deep, or because you are too lazy to raise arguments and give definitions. So you prefer to speak in some amorphous, general, uncommitted language, but really you could have formulated the same argument in the twelfth century. You don’t need the ridiculous terminology they use today. And the second part is nonsense. And the quality of a postmodern book is measured by the proportion of the first component out of the two in the book. The clear-cut postmodern books are all nonsense. Simply books devoid of all content, saying nothing.
[Speaker A] No, but don’t you see some consistency? After all, you just laid out the postmodernist argument in a very orderly way. It doesn’t even sound so far-fetched.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not far-fetched at all. I don’t agree with it, but it is absolutely not far-fetched. Yes, yes. What is there to say beyond that? About what are shelves of books and journals being written?
[Speaker A] You can always prove your point. There is, for example, Foucault, who took pains to prove that madness is only a social construction—or at least, I don’t know exactly how he argued it—that madness is a social construction, or that it too is a construction, I’m not entirely—I didn’t read the book. Yes, yes. There is something to write about here, as it were. Why?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is there to write? In the end what you are saying is that every claim a person makes is the outcome of an interest, of social construction, of discourse. That’s it, period. With that I have finished all postmodernism on earth.
[Speaker A] Yes, but you can prove it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, nobody can prove it.
[Speaker A] What do you mean? He shows you how this fellow in Africa would be considered a high priest because he was schizophrenic, and here they put him in a mental institution. So you see.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t see anything. That’s another feature of postmodern discourse: in postmodern discourse there is an arsenal or basket of conspiracies. Okay? There is a basket of conspiracies. Conspiracies against Blacks, conspiracies against women, conspiracies against the weak. The whole ridiculous concept of “the weakened” is a postmodern concept. There are no weak people; there are only people who have been weakened. Because weak is an objective state. Right.
[Speaker A] Weakened is the outcome of a plot.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Weak is an objective state. Weakened means that someone made him that way. Now, once you have such a basket, what happens? You take some phenomenon—this is what I mentioned earlier about the tycoons—you take some phenomenon and say, look, the tycoons are fighting for something like this. Well obviously, after all they profit from it. Therefore it is obvious that they are fighting for profit. That is a null argument on the logical level. It is a null argument, because the fact that I profit from something does not mean that that’s why I did it. I might do it because I believe in it, and I also profit. Right? The fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, as they say. Okay? So here too. Now I’m not saying all tycoons are righteous, I’m only saying that the argument showing that the tycoons are acting for their own interest is an argument that begs the question. It is an argument—it doesn’t show that they act for their interest; it shows that they
[Speaker A] profit as a result of it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s what happens. All postmodern arguments, like a thread running through them. You can go through all of them.
[Speaker A] So let’s go back for a second to my example. You see that in one place they take the madman in Africa and he is the village chief, and in another place he is in a mental institution.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, clearly that’s only a social construction. But I say, no, that’s not true. I say therefore it’s obvious that the Africans don’t understand psychology or psychiatry, and we do know, and therefore we do know this. We are right and they are not.
[Speaker A] I understand, I understand, nice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That too is an interpretation. Maybe he is right, maybe I am right. It could be. But a proof?
[Speaker A] You haven’t proved anything. Yes, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s why I say all these books prove nothing. They merely describe. But they describe the same point over and over. The same point, that everything you say is really only the outcome of an interest, the outcome of assumptions. And from the postmodernist’s standpoint, for example, the moment you point out assumptions at the base of an argument, that counts as a counterargument. That is called a counterargument. Do you understand? You don’t need to claim anything about those assumptions, whether they are reasonable or not. The mere fact that there are assumptions already counts as a counterargument. And that is ridiculous—well, ridiculous in my view. It is ridiculous because I say that if you accept no assumptions, then you have nothing to look for. After all, every argument is based on assumptions; you don’t need to expose them to understand that. Is there any argument without assumptions? Every argument derives a conclusion from assumptions.
[Speaker A] I want for a second to go back again to Marxism for a moment, in order to clarify something, something I thought about while you were speaking. We said that Marxist methodology is modernist and has already been shared for thousands of years by all the different ideologies, and on the other hand—not, not, not.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The methodology, no. That’s the second component. Why? Why do they say this about the other?
[Speaker A] Everyone says this about the other. Everyone, all religions and all these people, say about the other that he is either stupid or wicked.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s true, but it crystallized in its purest form in the Marxist period itself.
[Speaker A] With terms like false consciousness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The conception of truth, the philosophical conception of Marxism, was always that I am right and others are wrong. The subversiveness, looking at everything as some expression of something subversive, existed before too, and we brought examples even from Jewish law and so on, but it crystallized among the Marxists. Why? Because it takes time until you crystallize it. You can assume that others are stupid, say. Usually the claim is: others are stupid or wicked in the sense that they surrender to impulse, say. But not necessarily people who act out of some plot, necessarily out of some subversive plot for the sake of one interest or another. That is already the Marxist crystallization of this view. I’m not saying it wasn’t—it was already latent, of course, in ancient history too, in earlier conceptions, but it crystallized there. And from there postmodernism emerged.
[Speaker A] Good. Now I want—now we’ve talked about postmodernism and Marxism and a bit about their ability to oppress and exercise power, and I want to talk a bit about another subject. We are already in our own country. The conception guiding this conversation—and I think it is also a correct conception—is that what people think in everyday life, and the things they believe in, and I think we also saw this very nicely as we went along, are the result of deeper philosophical conceptions. For example, just now a few examples came to mind. So for instance, the belief that there are, say, infinitely many different genders and that anyone can say about himself whatever he wants, and that we are already far beyond male and female and nonbinary etc. etc. etc.—that stands in wildly clear correspondence with the things we’ve just been talking about, because really that’s exactly it. There is only subjective experience and there is no—and the very ability to say about someone that he is a woman or a man or, more than that, either a woman or a man—all of that flies off the table the moment it becomes merely subjective. What I now… But on the other hand, what has been happening in our country for a long time, and maybe on the global plane too—we should think about that—is that we are seeing a retreat of that conception. And on the other hand we… so we need to talk a little about that retreat, and here, I think, enters the alternative you speak about also in your book: the alternative of being aware that there is another person, he thinks the opposite of me, and developing some depth behind the ability to say that he is absolutely wrong and that my assumptions are more correct.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, here I really think that in that sense, there were even people who told me this—that in the book Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon there is some kind of prophecy, let’s call it that, a little pretentiously, but some kind of forecasting of the future, where indeed I think more and more people already saw the fingerprints back then. It’s not that I saw something completely different from the future, but I definitely think that—
[Speaker A] Absolutely. On the one hand yes, but on the other hand no, because we remained very right-wing in this country. Meaning, on the one hand the spiral into which the left has entered—you published the book in 2002. The spiral the left has entered since then is insane. I mean, I don’t think there was anyone in 2002 who would calmly argue that there are more than two genders, right? Nobody dared make such a claim in that period, in my opinion. And that’s obvious. But on the other hand, most people are not there. Most people are not there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said that too in the book. Okay. My claim about the synthetic alternative said that there is, after all, an alternative maturation, and the maturation process I describe there—we won’t get into it here—but the claim is that there is an alternative maturation. And I think—I said there is definitely a good chance that people would suddenly feel some kind of reaction against the postmodern brainwashing. Because in the end a great many people feel within themselves that they do believe in certain truths. They are not willing to give up and see everything they think as some kind of subjective construction—that I don’t really believe what I believe. Personally, I also think the great postmodernists do not really believe this. But what happens is that when you engage in—especially sophisticated people—when they try to rationalize and ask, wait, okay, inside I feel this way. But it’s obvious to me that this is an illusion, because on what basis? After all, every person is a landscape of his birthplace; the other person feels with the same degree of certainty the opposite. So precisely sophisticated people deny what they feel inside. And unsophisticated people lean on what they think inside. And what I tried to do was to offer a philosophically sophisticated alternative that allows people to stay connected to what they feel. Meaning, no—even if you are sophisticated, you don’t have to leave what you feel. “Feel” here is a concept—yes, not emotional feeling, but intuitive. I distinguish between emotion and intuition in the book. Yes, yes. And what is happening today is that there is a reaction, and I think, by the way, that it too is led by an intellectual avant-garde. Meaning, there are also intellectual parts that are doing this, although they try to hide it from public discussion. They don’t give a platform to conservative intellectuals, right-wing intellectuals, and so the feeling is that this is a movement of the masses against the intellectuals, but that isn’t true. Okay. This is a movement that is also led by intellectuals who give backing to the masses to remain what they are and not feel like idiots in relation to the smart people, who really are smart, intelligent people, who tell you: listen, there is no basis for what you feel. And therefore some kind of reaction is formed, because in the end all of us—including the greatest postmodernists—this is what they feel. It’s just that they, being sophisticated people, know how to overcome what they feel, suppress it, and tell you: friends, I know, I’m aware of it, but I live in an illusion. I know that I live in an illusion. And only a sophisticated person can say that to himself. Yes. So intellectuals in particular are in this state, as—who was it that said there are stupid things that only an intellectual is capable of saying?
[Speaker A] Orwell, Orwell said that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Orwell, exactly. In this matter that’s exactly the point, and it’s completely true, it’s no joke. It’s completely true. Only an intellectual can stand behind an abstraction that is very far from what he feels is true and say, okay, I understand that I feel otherwise, but I can also look at it from the outside, in some objective view, the way another person sees it, and say to myself: my friend, you are mistaken, you are living in an illusion, you are living inside a certain narrative. In that sense, it really is an impressive intellectual ability. But on the other hand, that intellectual ability leads him to a vacuum that in my view is unjustified. And therefore one of the main goals of the book, and of other books I wrote, is to give some intellectual support to those people who are not willing to do that. Meaning, to tell people: look, I feel this within myself, but that doesn’t mean it is merely subjective and has no basis. And for that purpose I argue for the synthetic conception and intuition, and I try to show there the alternative—how such a thing can really be grounded. In my view that is what is happening today. There is a big public reaction that says: friends, we’re not there. You ask me, so what are you basing this on? It’s an assumption. What do you base your assumption on? On the fact that I think it’s correct. That’s all. The other thinks otherwise, so the other is mistaken. Then immediately I’m accused of being chauvinistic because I say I think X—
[Speaker A] Because you’re wicked, because you generalized, you’re not a good person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They say you’re patronizing. The moment you dare to say that someone is wrong, they immediately accuse you of patronizing. What does that mean, patronizing? If I say X… No, it really is patronizing too.
[Speaker A] It really is patronizing. Because you really are insulting him, you really are insulting him. You are more right than he is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, there’s a subtle point here. I’m not claiming that I am certainly right. Each of us may be right and may be wrong. Otherwise it’s just arrogance. I’m not talking about certainty. But I’m saying: I examine the arguments of the other side, I examine my own arguments, and therefore the synthetic position requires openness. Yes, it sounds like something that leads to closed-mindedness, but that’s not true. Someone who believes in a certain truth and believes others are mistaken must first of all examine what they say in order to determine that they are mistaken. Meaning, you need openness in order to hold a synthetic position. After I have weighed all the possibilities, this is my conclusion. Now, I am not arrogant, I know I may be wrong, but for the time being, according to the best of what I have, I believe this is true. The moment I believe it is true, whoever says the opposite is wrong. That is a logical conclusion. If X is true, then not-X is not true. That is basic logic. So there is no patronizing here. It would be patronizing if I told you, “Look, there’s no chance you’re right, you idiot.” I’m not saying you’re an idiot, I’m saying you’re wrong. That’s not the same thing. I’m saying that if you listen to my considerations, maybe I’ll manage to persuade you, or maybe you’ll persuade me, no problem. But what happens in a postmodern world is that people are not willing to listen. Why are they not willing to listen? Because even if I persuade him, it would just be preaching. Because even if he is persuaded, in the end that too would only be some kind of plot, because we have no way to reach truth, because there is no truth. So you don’t even listen. The moment you don’t listen, you don’t believe that what you yourself are saying is true. So if someone says that what I am saying is true and what you are saying is mistaken, then he is merely patronizing. And what happens is that there are remnants of postmodern discourse that accompany the broader public, and it’s a terribly annoying mixture, but apparently it can’t be avoided. So even among the broader public, which does fight for its truth and is unwilling to give it up, it is still hard for it to say “I am right and the other is wrong.” There is something sensitive at the edges of consciousness—the breathing of postmodernism—telling you, “Don’t be patronizing, who said so?” There is some kind of mixed game here of these two kinds of thought, these two kinds of discourse, and that is part of a historical process. Meaning, when a conception is taking shape, obviously it contains many remnants of the previous conception. Slowly, I think, this will become clearer.
[Speaker A] I’d be glad—I know we’re moving along a bit. As far as I’m concerned I can continue a bit longer, I don’t know how much, but I can definitely continue, and I’d be glad if you’d elaborate on this. Because you explained it in a way—you explained it as a tool, meaning you explained what the advantages are or what the ways are in which a person can resist, a person who says that one truth exists, and begin to work it out. But what I would be glad to get from you is the justification for there being one truth—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] one truth, that at all—
[Speaker A] that at all there exists such a thing—let’s put it this way—that there exists such a concept as truth. If I’m not mistaken, at one time you mentioned Wittgenstein, whom I think it’s important to bring up—or to place at the forefront of our joy in this context—who said that one should not even use a concept like truth at all, because it contains behind it totally different things, and there’s no point in talking about it at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, well, Wittgenstein—it depends which Wittgenstein: early, late. It’s a bit of a complicated story. I’m also not enough of an expert on Wittgenstein to tell you all the nuances. But broadly speaking, the claim is that those feelings we sense within ourselves—and this brings me back to Kant and to Jung, which is why all my books basically start there. Because what lies at the root of the difficulty, and what ultimately led to postmodernism through Marxism and through everything else, is Hume’s objections. Hume’s objections say: how can you know that your generalizations are correct generalizations? How can you know that the causal explanation you propose is the right explanation? How can you know that something you think—not something you directly saw, but something that comes from your thought—really says something true about the world? Who said the world owes you anything? Now here I want to say, when I analyze this difficulty a bit, it’s the root of everything. Everything sits there. And the problem is that since there was no good answer throughout history to this difficulty, the postmodernists don’t leave the stage. Because you really have no way to answer their questions; they’re good questions. How do you know that what you think is true—maybe it’s a construct? And what I want to argue is that, in my view, this is the only answer that can be given to this issue, and in a certain sense it’s found in Husserl, in another sense it’s in Rabbi HaNazir, and even in Maimonides at the beginning of Guide for the Perplexed. I go over this again in the book Truth and Uncertainty, and I also spoke about it a bit in Two Wagons. The root of the problem is the dichotomous distinction that Hume makes, and Kant adopts without noticing, between cognition and thinking. Meaning, the claim that cognitive acts are only direct sensory observation. What I saw with my eyes, I saw; what I heard, I heard; what I touched, I touched. That’s it. Those are the things I sensed, and those are the things I observed—observed not only with the eyes but through all the senses. Anything beyond that is thought; it is not cognition. And then Hume says: fine, if it’s thought, thought is a function of how your mind is structured, how you were born. There’s no guarantee whatsoever that it gives you a correct answer about the world. And I claim that this is wrong. Here lies a different root. In other words, there are things beyond sensory observation that are also a kind of seeing, of cognition, not of thought. For example, when I see bodies falling toward the earth—bodies with mass—I can make lots of generalizations. That all elongated bodies fall toward the earth, that all bodies made of either wood or plastic—I don’t know, depending on which bodies I saw. But there is always the possibility of infinitely many generalizations. For some reason, almost all of us agree that the correct generalization is—after Newton found it, but the correct generalization is—that all bodies with mass fall toward the earth. That is the correct generalization. Now the skeptic, or in today’s language the postmodernist, asks: who told you that? That’s a generalization built on how you think; someone else will make a different generalization.
[Speaker A] He’ll say, he’ll say all yellow bodies, or all black bodies.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or yes, or all bodies painted some kind of color. Right—everything you’ve seen so far has a color, so there you go: all colored bodies fall toward the earth.
[Speaker A] Okay, now I’m thinking of a solution that’s a little different from the one you’re about to propose, but I want you to start with what you were going to propose first.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so my claim is basically that through looking at particular bodies falling toward the earth, we see the generalization that all bodies with mass fall toward the earth. We don’t make a generalization as an act of thought; we see the law of gravity. This is not seeing with the eyes, of course—it’s seeing through what Maimonides calls the eyes of the intellect.
[Speaker A] But if—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you don’t accept the existence of observation of that kind, then you can close up shop—you have to be a postmodernist.
[Speaker A] I see. And how are you supposed to accept it? After all, it’s not something you can—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You have to decide. Either you accept your primary intuitions as something that really does say something true about the world, or you don’t. It’s a matter of decision. But here it’s already a considered decision. In other words, the postmodernist doesn’t accept it, but he also has no reason—he can’t explain to me why he doesn’t accept it. I do accept it because it seems to me to be true, just like when I see something, then almost nobody disputes that it’s there. Why not? Maybe my eyes are deceiving me? Maybe it’s just an illusion? No—it’s clear to me because I saw it. I see that my intuition is a kind of cognition and not of thought. I simply experience it in an immediate way.
[Speaker A] I want to—I want to—okay, I want to keep developing what you’re saying. I want to ask how this connects—you connect it, at least in the book, to belief in God in a certain way. And up to now you’ve done it very nicely without Him, and here it’s not clear to me why we actually need that belief.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, here again, it’s a somewhat complicated and broad topic. My claim is that the reason is this: if in the end I think that I developed in some purely physical, material way, and there is no non-material dimension in reality—no soul, no God, and nothing else—then there is no real basis for this optimistic assumption that what I think really corresponds to what is happening in reality itself. When you look at mechanisms that are formed somehow, I don’t know, without a guiding hand, there is no reason to assume that they are reliable. Why assume they are reliable? Including my thinking and my cognition. I’m really saying this in a nutshell, because this needs a lot more elaboration. On my website I discuss this at length in the notebooks there on my site.
[Speaker A] We’ll put a link below.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, and there you can see it in more detail. But my point is that all these things, the beliefs embedded in us, are indeed embedded in us. But if we go with our sophisticated colleagues, the postmodernists, who ask: wait a second, just because it’s embedded in us doesn’t yet mean it’s really true. We’re some kind of physical creature or other—why on earth assume that what’s embedded in us is actually reliable? Our way of thinking, our way of cognizing? Here you need to assume that there is some factor that made sure of it. Now you can discuss why you think that’s so, and who told you there is such a factor, but I’m saying first of all as a matter of fact: if I think these things are reliable, then very likely, basically, in the subtext, I’m assuming that there is someone who made sure they would be reliable. Because otherwise there is no basis for that belief. Now one can come and continue to ask: wait, and who told you that? Okay, that’s another discussion. But I think it’s hard to say this without God. In other words, it’s—
[Speaker A] I understand. Now I want to try something else, with another line of reasoning I heard from a guy named Jordan Peterson. I don’t know if you’ve maybe heard of him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, there’s another example: Jordan Peterson, or Prager, yes, or all the conservative American philosophers or thinkers that people really like to make fun of. But that is exactly the conservative intellectual avant-garde in America, which always existed, but I think now it’s much stronger, and slowly it’s also reaching Israel. Israel is small, it’s a little hard here. Yes, it takes time.
[Speaker A] What he says is that we can attack this from a slightly different angle, and maybe even refute postmodernism, not just say there’s some arbitrary choice here between convention and intuition and so on. Because you can start from the premise that everyone believes in suffering. There is no person who doesn’t believe in suffering. There is no person who doesn’t want to escape suffering. In that sense you can say until tomorrow—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The argument as you present it—I don’t know it—but the argument as you present it seems very weak to me. I run from suffering because I suffer; I don’t want it to hurt. What do you mean?
[Speaker A] No, so again, if you have an existentialist conception of belief, your fleeing from suffering expresses the fact that you believe in it. You believe that it is completely real.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not belief—it hurts. No one denies that this exists, that it hurts him. What do you mean?
[Speaker A] Fine, but from here, in my view, you can move pretty quickly. So for example, when he talks about: what do you see when you see a cliff? When you see a cliff, what do you see? You don’t really see a cliff at all. You see a place you can fall from. In other words, among the range of possible interpretations of the world, there is only a very limited range of interpretations that will keep you alive. And if you see objects falling, the most important thing for you is that they’re falling, not what color they are. And what’s also most important for you is their weight, because they can hurt you. So what follows? It follows that out of all the interpretations, the only interpretation that will keep you in this world—and in that sense is also the most correct one—is the one that will prevent as much suffering as possible.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, here too I disagree. I disagree, first of all, because he assumes what has to be proved. Who said that this thing will keep me alive? He assumes that it’s true, and therefore he thinks only that will keep me alive. But someone who says it’s not true will say: what do you mean? That’s not what will keep me alive, because things that fall don’t really kill.
[Speaker A] Yes, but for that—yes, but that would really be going to a totally absurd extreme in order to make that claim.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] True, but he is attacking those who are at that absurd extreme. So if you’re already at that absurd extreme, then you can answer him the same way on this too. Beyond that, if you think correct thinking has the highest survival value, then the bill comes due. Because then it means that evolution too is an explanation for holding that view, and then you don’t need God, let’s say, or you don’t need—
[Speaker A] Not God—I’m saying he offers a different solution. You could say that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A lot of people argue that, even without Peterson. A lot of people argue that evolution is an alternative explanation. In my opinion, no—but a lot of people—
[Speaker A] Argue that it’s an alternative explanation that takes postmodernism out of the game. How exactly?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That evolution helps us perceive correctly, because whoever doesn’t perceive correctly doesn’t survive. So in that case we can trust our perceptions.
[Speaker A] Yes, but here again you’re basing this on your knowing that there is evolution only because first you looked at all kinds of apes that developed, so that itself—you yourself—could be that this—completely.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After all, the theory of evolution itself is a product of my thinking.
[Speaker A] If I don’t have—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My thinking—then I won’t accept evolution either. So evolution cannot be an explanation for the validity of my thinking.
[Speaker A] I understand. Though it could be that this can still be used as a good tool, because you really can push those people in a very radical direction. They’ll have to tell you it’s irrelevant, that they don’t really see people—but to that extent they’ll be lying. They’ll be completely lying, because if something falls on them they’ll jump aside.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So they’ll say it’s instinct, just instinct. I’m saying—I’ve met people like that, and in my books that’s what I try to do: show people that if you take your view directly all the way to its end, you have to arrive at very radical positions that I don’t think any of you really hold. And if you don’t hold them, then please explain to me those things that you do accept—not everything, not God, but the things you do accept—on what basis do you accept them? You probably are willing to accept that there is another tool besides direct sensory observation. If so, then what do you want from me? So I accept from it a few more things. At that point you no longer have the principled attack on things that go beyond direct sensation, direct sensory sensation. Therefore this is one of those points where, in the intellectual world, you deal with pure theses, and very often of course these are simplifications that don’t really appear in reality. In reality itself, there are hardly any people there, I think—people who are totally skeptical. But on the other hand, a great many people present a thesis that is indeed completely skeptical; they just don’t live that way. Why don’t you live that way? I mean, you don’t really believe in it. If you don’t really believe in it, then don’t present that thesis. That’s the kind of argument I also use in my books. So true, in reality people are never at the extreme pole. But their arguments are arguments drawn straight from there; they just use them only where it’s convenient. When they attack God, they ask, who told you? But when you attack them—why do you run away from a stone falling on you?—then they’ll tell me, because my intuition says so, or science says such-and-such. And then you try to explain: wait, but that comes from the same place. This is intuition and that is intuition. Now I’m not saying that anyone who accepts the validity of intuition has to accept all of my intuitions. I’m saying he cannot attack me for the very fact that I trust intuition.
[Speaker A] That you have an intuition. Exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now you can argue about what the intuition says, and where it is correct and where it isn’t. But the attack on the very fact that I have an intuition is an attack that in essence is radical, even though it’s raised by people who are not at the radical pole. And that is exactly the problem: people are not philosophers. Once you are a philosopher, then your idea can be discussed more directly.
[Speaker A] Yes. Rabbi Michael Abraham, in my opinion this is a fascinating discussion. I really had a great time, I enjoyed it very much. And best of luck with the books. Right now I know that you also teach at Bar-Ilan, at the Advanced Torah Institute, and maybe we’ll get to speak again. Thank you very much for your time.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You will. Goodbye.
[Speaker A] Goodbye, bye-bye.