Q&A: Substance of Concepts and of Nonsense
Substance of Concepts and of Nonsense
Question
The Rabbi mentions several times his belief that a dispute about concepts cannot be resolved by calling one side “Yekum Purkan,” because the dispute is about a concept, and concepts have substance. This even led you to retract your dismissal of the issue of the multiplicity of intuitions (regarding observation of concepts, unless I’m not up to date on your view on the matter).
If the Rabbi is not willing to accept the naive-analytic picture that disputes about concepts are meaningless, how is the Rabbi willing to accept the naive picture that so many relatively intelligent people (after all, the Rabbi attributes this to 50 percent of the opinions floating around him) are speaking nonsense? If so many people with some intelligence are saying things that the Rabbi defines as nonsense, isn’t that a good enough reason to try to re-examine our definitions of nonsense? I’ve heard a lot about the Rabbi’s mockery of methods like “the unity of opposites,” “the leap into nothingness,” and “living in the absurd,” but masses of people think this way and arrive at these conclusions, despite the Rabbi’s cries and protests. It reminds me a bit of the Rabbi’s immortal example about formerly Religious-Zionist people who became secular and the relationship between philosophy and psychology, where the Rabbi is on the side of the psychologists…
Answer
Hello Mario.
First, even if I wanted to find some merit in the mantras of “the unity of opposites” — there simply is none. It’s nonsense. If something is shown to be nonsense, we won’t decide that it isn’t just because it seems likely that many people aren’t mistaken. As a matter of fact, here they are mistaken. On the contrary, check the definitions of nonsense again and suggest something else to me.
As for statements that are not contradictions but are simply empty — it seems to me to be the same thing. That can certainly provide motivation to examine the matter again, but there is never any guarantee what the examination will turn up. If it still turns out that those statements are empty — then that is the conclusion one must reach.
By the way, I’m really not on the side of the psychologists. Exactly the opposite. I argue that both the psychologists and the philosophers are right, but the plane of the discussion is always the philosophical one (because the psychological one is not relevant to a discussion between people and positions). Note this well.