Q&A: On the Moral Inclination as Realizing a Religious Ideal
On the Moral Inclination as Realizing a Religious Ideal
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In your book The First Being, in the fourth conversation, p. 406, you express reservations about Rabbi Kook’s claim that the pioneering motivations have religious significance.
However later on, p. 428, you view the instinctive moral inclination as an inclination that at its root contains an unconscious faith.
If so, why deny any religious value to performing an act out of an ideal, which I assume at its depth contains a religious inclination?
I am fairly convinced that Rabbi Kook also understood it this way, out of recognition of the inner inclination, which for him is the true one. This also emerges from what he wrote in The Perplexed of the Generation, chapter 10, and in the parallel passage in his article Channels in the Negev, that we need to show young people how the inclinations they hold are the ideals of the Torah.
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. I am not denying the existence of unconscious beliefs or their influence. I am only claiming that they have no value, because they were not adopted through my conscious decision. A person deserves credit only for things he does consciously and by his own decision. A person with a good character does not deserve credit for that.
Discussion on Answer
I do disagree in two ways: I see no reason to assume that this is the unconscious motivation. And in addition, as I understand him, Rabbi Kook sees value in this.
I truly don’t understand. You devote extensive parts of the fourth conversation to proving that both within morality and in the very reliance on consciousness there is embedded a faith in God that we can uncover, and if I also use your assumptions from the introduction and the first conversation—to prove that originally the person was a believer, only he was not aware of it.
If so, then in the very aspiration for life and the surge of action there also lies a great faith, and all that is needed is to open the eyes of its bearer so that he understands this. Isn’t that so?
In the booklet there I explained the philosophical necessity. Without faith, morality has no validity. Rabbi Kook is speaking about a psychological connection, not a philosophical one.
But even on the psychological plane, how do you know that the aspiration for life and the surge of action also presuppose faith? Because Rabbi Kook declares that this is so? Why not say that at the root of the desire to eat breakfast lies faith in Maharishi Yogi and transcendental meditation? I can’t understand what exactly I’m supposed to explain here. Let him explain it.
Okay, I personally probably understood him differently.
Definitely from the philosophical side and not the psychological one.
Well then, sorry for shifting the discussion to the person himself, but you don’t *really* disagree with Rabbi Kook (though I do interpret him the way I think, and not necessarily in some rigidly fixed way).