Q&A: Is Everything Logic?
Is Everything Logic?
Question
Good evening, Rabbi. I’ve been following you for a long time, and in light of a few points you raised in your last post, I thought I’d pour out some thoughts that came to mind, and I’d be glad to hear your opinion…
What emerges for me from reading your work, if I had to sum it up in two words, is the view that “everything is logic,” and whatever is not—is nonsense. Even what is not logically necessary (like formal halakhic obligation) still has to be explained logically and consistently. I have nothing against that, but the natural question arises: why logic? What happened that made it so absolute, such that everything rests on it? It’s a somewhat analytical question, but logic is ultimately just a formalization of a mode of inference that gives us a feeling of certainty (that’s how you explained in your books the inclusion of all the things we call “truth” under one concept, and from there you argued for the existence of concepts). Logic gives a feeling of certainty just as rhetoric and demagoguery create a feeling of certainty, yet nobody imagines that they are our truth and that whatever is not formulated through them is meaningless. So true, one can think without rhetoric and one cannot think without logic—but does it still define truth for us? There are people who say both that God knows tomorrow (that is, the knowledge exists) and that we choose, and then you’ll say, “They are making a logical mistake.” So what? What gives logic the great authority that you attribute to it? If we take the analogy from the Rabbi’s truly unprecedented and illuminating enterprise regarding the hermeneutical principles, one can formalize the intuitions, but the formalization gets its power from the intuition. And if there is an intuition that fails logically, then the failure is in the formalization, not in its source.
Thank you very much for everything, Mario.
Answer
Hello Mario.
The question is what you mean by logic. Usually that term means valid inferences. If so, then not everything is logic. On the contrary, in several of my works I have pointed out that not everything can be logic, since every logical inference is based on premises (axioms), and they are not derived from a logical argument.
I do agree that everything has to be reasonable and explained, and that there is no such thing as “above reason” (in Hasidic terminology: beyond reason and understanding) and the other nonsense people spout.
In the example of God’s foreknowledge and free will, we are dealing with a logical contradiction. If you accept both sides together, then in fact you are saying neither this nor that. Moreover, a basic rule of logic is that from a contradiction one can infer anything. So if you accepted both sides together, then you both do not believe in God and also do believe in Him. And what you wrote in the passage you sent me also means the opposite of what is written there, and therefore I do not know what it says. You understand that this is nonsense. There is no such thing as above logic or outside logic.
As stated, this does not mean that everything has to be based on a logical argument. But if there is a logical contradiction, then necessarily the claim is incorrect and must be rejected out of hand. You cannot adopt something and its opposite. And anyone who declares that he does adopt that is simply babbling himself to death. He is saying nothing, only moving his lips. Of course, if he enjoys it, who am I to stop him. But he should not expect an answer from me.
The fundamental mistake is that logic has no authority, only validity. It is not true because we decided it has authority, but simply because it is true. That is not in our hands, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is also subject to it. See, for example, what I wrote here:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%9B%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%91%D7%94-%D7%9C%D7%97%D7%95%D7%A7%D7%99-%D7%94%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94/
Discussion on Answer
I do not know what experiential meanings are. Poetry does not make claims, and I have no argument with it. If you bring an example, I’d be happy to discuss it, because this discussion seems meaningless to me.
I heard in the Rabbi’s lecture on The Voice of Prophecy, about negative attributes, that before the Rabbi explained the difference between one-zero and one-minus-one, he said: why do we say “God is one” and not “God is many,” if in any case He is neither this nor that? (One, but not in the sense of oneness.) And the Rabbi said that still, with negative attributes, we nevertheless have a sense that we are still saying something. Now before the formulation of the difference between light-darkness and cold-heat, is that feeling meaningless without the formulation? Does it say nothing? Is, for example, The Lonely Man of Faith a nonsensical work? Of course one can say yes, but then the question of honesty arises, and I appeal to the Rabbi as a person who feels, experiences, and lives—not in order to needle you, really: does the Rabbi honestly think that human beings should not relate to intuition at all? If I have a feeling and I discover that many feel it (for example, the absurdity of existence in Kierkegaard, to which for some reason I have the feeling the Rabbi does not attribute much significance), is that meaningless? Honestly…
If so then fine, apparently we’re not of the same species. Even the greatest and most rational philosophers have a human dimension, and it seems to me that common sense points דווקא to its existence…
Who said anything about not relating to intuition? I wrote books in its praise and about its necessity.
I’ll stop the discussion here because it sounds to me like a mere jumble of words. If you want, raise a concrete question with a specific example and we can discuss it.
A. My intention indeed was to refer to the Rabbi’s synthetic logic (or mode of thinking).
B. If I paraphrase an example I heard from the Rabbi: if an alien landed, and when you told him “both X and not-X” he nodded in understanding, and he told you he doesn’t understand what the problem is—both X and not-X—would you be able to explain to him why that has no meaning? The law of non-contradiction is a law of a form of thinking; we are not capable of picturing such a thing, but why is that considered nothing at all? It still has some kind of meaning even if it cannot be pictured (which, in my opinion, is the real intent of Rabbi Nazir in the distinction between “auditory” logic and “visual” logic, where indeed there is no both-and-not-both; see on this in section C). So one can infer anything from it—so what? Again I say: all the power of logic comes from the fact that its foundations (like the law of non-contradiction, the basic syllogism, etc.) are formalizations of our mode of thought, and there could be different modes of thought. It does not seem justified to me to say that the laws of logic simply “are what they are,” and that something that does not fit them does not exist (or is meaningless).
C. Even if you entrench yourself in your position and say that the way you think (and the way we all think, no matter) is everything, there is no doubt that this kind of contradictory statement has experiential meaning, even if it cannot be formulated (see Shemoneh Kevatzim, collection 7, section 41). I think that when a person reads contradictory paragraphs by Rabbi Kook, or Hasidic statements like the example you wrote, they have experiential meaning. I agree that this is not mathematics, or that one cannot make a science out of it, but it is definitely not meaningless. To say that is simply to ignore a very fundamental layer of human experience. (Of course you can say that this whole paragraph I wrote is nonsense, but I think—and I’m fairly sure—that for most people it does contain some kind of meaning, even if they cannot explain it.)