Q&A: Intellectual Commitment
Intellectual Commitment
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: in your opinion, what is the reason for the sense of obligation-curiosity-thinking-acceptance of the authority of intellectual thought?
Does it come only from an instinctive / psychological place (in the sense of philosophy = love of wisdom), or perhaps an evolutionary one—someone more rational has a higher chance of survival?
Or does it come from a value-based place, or even a religious one?
For example, one can imagine a person who is an intellectual nihilist, who is not interested in anything, and even on the pragmatic level prefers the here and now rather than long-term thinking. And in fact, sometimes you really do encounter different people with different levels of this.
Answer
If you are asking on the essential level (why the intellect is the way to arrive at truth), I did not understand the question. The intellect is the tool for arriving at truth. It is like asking: why do we walk with our legs? Would you want to arrive at truth with your legs or your nose?
And if you are asking psychologically, then there is no need to resort to that. Since this is the way to arrive at truth, that is why we use it.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand the question. What does it mean, where does the obligation to clarify the truth come from? You want to know how to act, so you check how to act.
In my opinion, wisdom has value in and of itself. Values cannot be explained. Why is there value in human life? Why is there value in another person not suffering?
Regarding normative truth:
The question, of course, is not when a person is already within the truth and then is obligated to uphold it.
Rather, before he is in a state of recognizing the truth, why would we generally say that he has an intellectual obligation in relation to it—for example, to clarify it, or to examine it.
Regarding neutral truth(?):
Why do human beings find value in the very search itself, in curiosity, in the attempt to discover the external or internal world—for example, in the various fields of science, from the natural sciences to the humanities?
For example, you can meet many conservative religious people who would see no value at all in being a scientist. (What would be preferable—that Einstein was a physicist or a Torah scholar? Obviously a Torah scholar.)
So do you think there is value in being a scientist? That is not the common approach nowadays.
And if we are not talking about a value, does it simply come from a psychological place of instinctive inner satisfaction? And for that a person “wastes” most of his time.