Q&A: Understanding the Boundaries of the Self and Its Circles — Emergence — Mental Fragments
Understanding the Boundaries of the Self and Its Circles — Emergence — Mental Fragments
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
1. I wanted to ask what the relationship is between the individual “self” and the circles around me—my family, the community, the nation, the world, and so on.
That is, do you mean that just as one can distinguish between my body and my consciousness, and claim that the more distinct “self” is the mental dimension, the “soul,” while I also have a material dimension such as my fingertips—so too it is not correct to identify the “self” as ending at my hands, but rather it extends into broader circles such as family, nation, and the world?
Or alternatively, are you saying this on the normative level—that I belong to a group greater than myself?
2. What is the source of the Rabbi’s understanding that a collective exists? After all, according to the Rabbi’s approach in his books, he does not accept strong emergence, so how does something like a collective arise from a collection of individuals? And to what extent is it really an entity, what is its relationship to the individual? And how does such an entity come into being through the process of association?
3. The Rabbi argues that if someone is remembered, then something of him remains with me, and thus in a certain sense he remains in this world. I wanted to ask whether the Rabbi has expanded on this idea anywhere, so as to understand your picture of the “self.”
P.S.
Although we hold like the Rabbi regarding the studies on the Tanya—that whoever tries to define the self fails, oscillating between speaking about the thing in itself and defining its properties—still, I came to ask the Rabbi to expand on the properties and boundaries of the individual self and its circles on the broader level.
Answer
- I didn’t understand the question. Am I the center and others are the periphery? Why? What is special specifically about me? My obligation is of course first of all to myself, and I discussed that in column 266.
- I’m not arguing here for emergence. On the contrary, my claim is that in the collective there is something in addition to the particulars that compose it. Exactly as the soul turns the body into an organic entity, and that is not emergence. The Sages call this something the ministering angel of the nation (and they see it as an angel. But for me this is a metaphor for something like the soul of the nation. And in the sense of all humanity, the Holy One, blessed be He, is “one of the people”). I didn’t understand the questions of how this entity is created. Historically? Go and see. Metaphysically? I don’t know how to answer such questions.
- I don’t recall.
Discussion on Answer
1. I didn’t understand. Many have already argued that morality is egoism toward the collective. What does this hair-splitting have to do with us?
2. I don’t know. That’s why this discussion really seems unnecessary to me and not well defined. In any case, if your intention is to relate God to humanity as soul relates to body, that’s an old idea and has nothing to do with panentheism. If that’s its meaning, then it’s just an uninteresting word game.
2.1. Not from the side of hair-splitting, but from the ontological side.
Is it reasonable to claim that the self does not end in consciousness and body, but only begins there, and continues into other things in being, for example family or nation?
Because if the ministering angel of the nation is external to the people of the nation, how exactly is there a connection between the ministering angel of the nation and the people of the nation?
But if we are speaking of identity between them, is that not emergent thinking?
With God’s help, 12 Tevet 5780
To K — greetings,
Every minister has a ministry over which he is appointed: there is a minister of the interior and a minister of foreign affairs, a minister of defense and a minister of finance, a minister of justice and a minister of education, and the minister cannot fulfill his role without a “ministry” dedicated to carrying out that purpose.
Every individual has a personal purpose, a goal he sets for himself. But since a person generally does not find meaning only in eating and “drinking and enjoying life,” but also needs purposes that involve repairing and settling the world, one person sees his mission in cultivating culture, another in developing science, another has a purpose to develop the economy, another finds his uniqueness in promoting health or environmental quality, and another has a purpose to bring justice and uprightness into the world.
A person cannot realize these purposes alone, and he must join a collective, a “ministry,” that will cultivate and carry them out. Therefore an inseparable part of a person’s identity is his belonging to the “ministry,” to the collective that realizes that idea which he sees as his central purpose.
Usually a person chooses which “ministry” to belong to, and his belonging to that collective is not essential; today he is in this “collective” and tomorrow in another. Different from all of them is the Jew, whose Creator chose him to be in the “ministry of holiness,” intended to maintain “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” that will spread the values of the Torah and its faith throughout the world.
This “collective” was founded as a “collective” by Jacob and his sons, from whom the story of the Patriarchs as individuals becomes the story of a nation with a mission. Therefore as long as the seed of Jacob exists, Jacob as the founder of the “collective” also exists, for Jacob’s mission will not come to an end through all generations.
Regards, Shatz
Lewinger,
If so, then the whole purpose of the collective is only as a social contract, to carry out the motives of the individual’s will by means of additional servants for this task… but I doubt whether this is the Rabbi’s view.
Also, your words imply a bit that the ideal of the gentile is not objective but rather an arbitrary goal to satisfy his craving.
With God’s help, 12 Tevet 5780
What Rabbi Michael Abraham’s position would be regarding my suggestion, I do not know, but it seems to me that it is not impossible, since I am not saying that “the mission of the nation” is essentialist.
According to my suggestion, the “ministering angel of the nation” is the ideal underlying the existence of that “nation” or “collective” for whose sake people organize, and I have no reason at all to claim that a gentile has no ideals that motivate him. The fact is that there are people from the nations of the world who give their lives for ideals in which they believe.
The difference I pointed out is whether the ideal for whose sake the collective acts is chosen or determined by divine decision. If the ideal is chosen, it may be that so-and-so believes today in communism and therefore joins with all his fervor the People’s Republic of North Korea or China, “the foundation of the throne of communism in the world” 🙂 and tomorrow he will conclude that specifically Islam will redeem the world, and from now on he must join Iran or ISIS, which bear this banner 🙂 and the day after tomorrow he will conclude that specifically democracy will redeem the world and will join the United States of America.
By contrast, the mission of “the assembly of Jacob” is not chosen. The Holy One, blessed be He, designated every Jew to be part of those who bear this banner, and he is not free to escape it. Whether he wants to or not, he is part of the collective whose mission this is.
Regards, Shatz
Thank you,
What is the relationship between the ideal and a “chosen collective”? If every collective is chosen, then the meaning is that the individuals influence the collective, which in turn changes its ideal; but if so, how can one say that the ministering angel of the collective is the ideal…?
B. I didn’t understand the relationship between the individuals within that collective. Is there a whole there beyond the sum of its parts? Because your words imply that the different people there do not have anything essential in common, only a shared idea.
But if so, it is difficult in the laws of war—how can one apply the law of a pursuer to the collective at the expense of the individuals?
If I define the “ministering angel of the nation” as the ideal that guides it (and in the words of Maimonides, the angels are the good thoughts and the harmful agents are the bad thoughts), then if the association changed its purpose, then “a new face has come here.” The people may be the same people, but the “association” is a different association belonging to the domain of another “minister” (= ideal). An Aristotelian analogy: if I take boards that were a chair and turn them into a table, then the “form” has completely changed even though the “matter” is the same matter 🙂
In contrast, the “nation” is first and foremost a concept from the “world of ideas,” which is a very real world indeed, since the idea exists and influences the world, even if the political framework that supported it has weakened or been nullified. There is also a concept of a “state,” which is defined by the existence of a government that imposes its authority over a territory, and the sign that determines this is “its coin goes in the state”—the coin minted by the king is the means of payment accepted in that state. The Torah recognizes this institution so that a vacuum not be created that would bring about “each man would swallow his fellow alive.”
In a “state” that really is only a “limited liability company,” we do not say that the individuals are nullified in relation to it. What is permitted to the king by virtue of “the law of the kingdom is the law” is permitted, but one millimeter beyond the boundaries of “the law of the kingdom is the law” is outright theft on the part of the king. Thus, for example, Maimonides rules (Chapter 11 of the Laws of Robbery) that a king’s law that discriminates between people has no validity and is “the robbery of the kingdom” and not “law.”
It seems that the laws of war are a “necessary evil.” As long as we need kingdoms so that the world not become ownerless, and as long as there is no international legal authority to decide conflicts, every king has the authority to fight for what seems just to him, and one cannot demand that any kingdom be a “sucker” toward its enemies. According to the authors of Torat HaMelekh, in wars between nations and between them and Israel, the rule of “one life is not pushed aside for another life” does not apply; rather, the preservation of the lives of a few is set aside for the preservation of the lives of the many.
When the vision of the prophets is fulfilled, that all the nations will stream to the House of the God of Jacob so that King Messiah may teach them of the ways of God and judge between the nations—then truly there will no longer be a need for wars, and King Messiah will instruct his army minister, “weapon [= weaponry] kit”—the tanks will be beaten into little tractors and the daughters of Israel will go out in them to plow the fields 🙂
If the collective has a shared “soul” (the “minister”), it turns the collective into an organic entity. You can call that the “self” not ending, but in my opinion that is misleading terminology. The self does end, but that self wears two hats: an individual hat and the hat of an organ within an organism or a part of a collective. Just as it is correct to say that the hand ends at the boundary of the hand, but it is an organ within an organism, which is the body.
1. I didn’t mean in the normative sense but in the ontological sense. By way of analogy: just as you hold that your hand is part of the “self,” so one could say that the self does not end at the fingertips but at the community/world, etc. And then solve the question of altruism by claiming that I act for the sake of self—but not the individual self, rather the world-encompassing one.
2. If so, this really continues to connect to 1. What does it mean that there is such an entity called the soul of the nation? Is your soul, for example, part of a larger soul chain of emanation and so forth? How does this work in the metaphysical sense?
After all, if these are two completely different entities, then it is not clear what the connection is between the nation and the individuals in it….