Q&A: On Non-Rational Considerations in Faith
On Non-Rational Considerations in Faith
Question
The 12th of the month
First of all, I want to express my appreciation for the Rabbi’s love of truth and for many of the very beautiful ideas I’ve encountered in his various books (some of which I bought with my hard-earned money… J).
With all that appreciation, I feel that the Rabbi delegitimizes everything that cannot be reduced to rational philosophical considerations. It seems to me that the Rabbi does to the whole range of human faculties what postmodernism does to your beloved intellect. As someone committed to a complex religious approach, I find myself enjoying the Rabbi’s writings, but no less than that I enjoy the writings of Rabbi Kook and various Hasidic teachings—Chabad, Breslov, Ishbitza, and more. Therefore I feel some need to make peace between all those who speak loftily about the power of non-rational faith and “throwing away the intellect,” and Your Honor.
Especially since Your Honor serves as a guide for many…
It is indeed true that the intellect is the most objective faculty in a person, even though it is not absolute, and as the Rabbi distinguishes between truth and certainty. But that does not mean that every faculty that is not objective is therefore completely illegitimate. Let me explain:
A person is made up of many faculties that move the personality to do and think various things. One can divide this roughly into intellect, emotion, will, and pleasure. (Yes, yes, this is from the kabbalists.) Will and pleasure are really two sides of the same coin, since a person wants what gives him pleasure. There is a connection between the different planes, because I will usually take pleasure only in things that seem true to me, and I will feel guilty (a type of emotion!) if I enjoy something that seems false to me—not to mention the pleasure taken in intellectual matters, which is direct pleasure in truth, something intellectual, (like the pleasure the Rabbi has in writing sharp things when they clarify the truth…).
Clearly, when I encounter some claim or some spiritual statement, the first faculty I activate in that context is the intellect. It carries out the initial clarification, within its limitations, regarding new things. But if I get stuck there, that is psychological disability. I must continue and trust the feelings or desires that are born from that. Let me give an example: if I meet a woman on the street, I don’t pay attention to everything my heart tells me about her, but only to what my intellect tells me… But after I met my wife and saw, intellectually, that it was right to build a shared life with her, I build an entire structure of feelings, desires, experiences, and so on in relation to her. True, sometimes there are people who build a whole world of experiences and emotions with the neighbor’s wife, but that doesn’t mean I should scorn everything I built regarding the wife of my youth. The same applies to beliefs and opinions. After I marry Judaism, for example, if every morning I examine it objectively—”the size of her nose” as of today (they say it’s the only organ that grows all one’s life…)—she’ll divorce me very quickly…
I also want to argue that certain religious feelings also have clarificatory value—that is, they carry weight in the question of how to live—on three planes: 1. post-faith, 2. existentialist, 3. experiential.
I’ll elaborate one by one:
- Post-faith — after I accept the existence of God, and the fact that “God prophesies to human beings” as a true fact even if not certain, is it correct to say that He limits Himself to a certain channel? I think it is legitimate to accept the idea that God appears in every part of my personality and thus helps me reach truth. Even if that sounds ridiculous to you regarding various ecstatic religious experiences, would you also deny the validity of the moral sense in a person as a kind of divine manifestation?! And if the moral sense, then why not the sense of holiness? The fact that the very idea of divinity “does it” for roughly all of humanity (except maybe for the last two hundred years, and even in those, heresy is pretty lame in human hearts), is in my eyes definitely a divine manifestation. The fact that the idea of one infinite God, who is also moral and was revealed at Sinai, swept away a third or two of humanity is also, in my eyes, a kind of divine manifestation no less than the moral feeling in man.
And if you tell me: fine, so do you believe in Christianity and Islam? I would answer that to a certain extent, yes, as far as humanity as a whole is concerned—they bring the world to a truer place, though in my view not a complete one, and also not entirely fitting for me as part of the Jewish people.
I also believe that the leftism of leftists (although some of it seems rather unhealthy to me) and the love of nature of various green organizations are types of divine manifestation!!!
By the way—we have a shared beloved figure: Rabbi David Cohen, “the Nazir.” This is not the place to expand on my more or less dubious ideas about the nature of “the auditory Hebrew logic,” but it seems to me that one aspect of it (and it definitely has many aspects, which I do not know how to unify properly, and I doubt whether the Nazir knew, and if he knew, whether he wrote it down somewhere) is the understanding that someone is speaking to us through all of reality, as a remnant of prophecy.
- Existentialist — many times the religious experience conquers the whole personality just like love or drugs… and then it simply isn’t relevant to argue that it isn’t objective, because it is stronger than any other motivating force in the personality, and then I simply don’t ask anyone… It’s hard for me to elaborate on this; I feel I’m not formulating it well enough. But perhaps a good example is the fact that there is no point debating with me about my very life, whether it is worthwhile or not. It is a kind of basic assumption, such that if it is not true, then really nothing else matters to me, because all my contact with reality is through the prism of my personality. I didn’t explain that well… maybe I’ll try later.
- Experiential — in point 1 I argued that after I accept the reality of the connection between the Creator and His creatures, there is value to all the surrounding experiences. But here I want to argue, cautiously, that all experiences—and especially the faith-experience that gives rise in a person to a yearning for the transcendent, or what we Jews call the sacred or holiness—are not only a divine manifestation within the human personality, but also a divine calling. When emotion is not a whim but something that exists and operates very, very strongly (even more than intellect) in humanity as a whole, and among our people exists in a range of personalities and countless situations (just think of the fact that the Baba Sali and Rabbi Soloveitchik belong to the same people…) and drives historical processes, etc., then there is something real here. Even if one can argue that it’s just brain juices, that’s a bit unfair. After all, one can say the same thing about the intellect; but then one loses every basis for any worldview whatsoever.
And I’ll conclude again with my appreciation for the Rabbi’s courage to speak the truth—how simple, and how uncommon….
Answer
With God’s help
Aleph, שלום. Many thanks for the compliments.
You say you’ve read my books, and therefore I’m a bit surprised by your questions. There is some conceptual confusion in them (or at least a mismatch with the meaning in which I use these concepts).
Emotion is a kind of feeling that does not depend on me. It is an instinct that arises on its own. True, sometimes an intentional action of mine creates emotions (some interpret the commandments of emotion that way—love, hatred, fear, joy, and the like), and even here emotion is still the effect, while intellect and will are what produce it. Therefore commandments and decisions are relevant only to the intellect, not to its products.
From my perspective, emotion is not a source of decisions in any way or in any context. Decisions are made by the intellect, and by it alone. In matchmaking, for example, as you mentioned, the emotional connection is very important, and therefore the intellect should take into account what the heart says when making the decision. But the decision is still made by the intellect and not by the heart. If someone hands the decision over to emotion, that means he has decided (with his intellect) not to decide, and therefore lets emotion drag him along. But to let something that arises without control drag you along means not deciding. You are not responsible for such an act, and you did not decide to do it. It is not your act, because you are being acted upon, not acting. It is being swept along.
Sometimes people call intuition emotion, but that is conceptual confusion. As I explained in my books (Two Carts, Truth and Not Stable), intuition is a branch of the intellect.
Enjoyment and pleasure cannot be deciding factors. At most they are data that the intellect takes into account when making decisions. What would it even mean to let enjoyment or pleasure decide for me? I do not even understand the meaning of the words. Either the intellect decides while taking into account the data of enjoyment and pleasure, or the intellect decides not to decide and lets pleasures and enjoyments drag it along, in which case it is not a decision at all but being swept along.
For example, when you say that pleasure expresses truth, what that means is that when you follow pleasure, it is because of the assumption that pleasure expresses truth. But in the final analysis, this is an intellectual decision that pleasure reflects truth, and therefore you follow it (what determines things is the truth, not the pleasure). But to let pleasure drag you along without assuming that it expresses truth is just being swept along. Therefore, either in this case too the intellect is what decides, or it truly is not a decision. And so too regarding your other claims.
The claim that there are forces that move a person and cause him to act may perhaps be a factual claim. But what does that prove? At most, that people do foolish things. Our psychology sometimes drags us along and neutralizes the will and the intellect that are supposed to make decisions. But that is an unfortunate fact, not an ideal. Alternatively, those forces express an intellectual decision, as above.
One can enjoy Hasidism, and of course that says nothing. One can also enjoy a cream cake. If you mean that you learn something from Hasidism, that is only because there are logical-rational claims there (sometimes there are such things there too). Hasidism is not necessarily the opposite of thought and intellect (though in my opinion it definitely suffers from vague concepts and claims that sound very deep but actually say nothing).
In short, in my humble opinion, the claims in your words are either conceptual confusion (you call certain intellectual acts “emotion” or “pleasure”), or else they describe being swept along rather than decisions. One should not idealize a person who does not decide but is dragged along.
If you want to continue the discussion, please focus on one claim and we can discuss it. It is hard to respond to so many things (I am constantly in dialogue with several people at once), and it also comes out unfocused. For example, give me a case in which pleasure is the correct way to make a decision and that decision is not intellectual. I claim there is no such case. The same goes for any other psychological faculty. Give me one example and we can discuss it.