Q&A: On the Spirit of the Law
On the Spirit of the Law
Question
After reading your fascinating book The Spirit of the Law (an especially uplifting intellectual and Torah experience), I have two questions—one fundamental and one marginal:
- A bit insider-ish—but how, in your view, does the philosophical framing you give to the words of Maimonides (and Nachmanides) relate to his own intention in the roots? Is this interpretation too a kind of transparent, idea-revealing vision, or something more like a branching development?
- You wrote that the peak of Maimonides’ non-positivism comes in abolishing the partitions between logic and ontology—in your words: “Not only can we observe the facts through the eyes of the intellect, seeing the general fact through the particular fact. We can also ‘see’ murkier kinds of connections between facts, connections of types whose existence positivism does not recognize at all (since according to it, what cannot be seen does not exist). The differences between analogy, induction, and deduction, according to Maimonides, are not found only on the logical plane, that is, in our thinking. These differences are found in observed reality itself (Jewish law, in our case).” And you added that this view has implications in the field of philosophy of science. Could the Rabbi explain what he means by these implications? How can seeing non-binary logical connections as something real and observable affect scientific theories?
Answer
1. I’ve written several times that sometimes a person sees in his rabbi’s words, or in some book, an idea that the author himself never thought of. That does not necessarily mean he is mistaken. Sometimes the author himself does not fully understand what is embedded in his own words—for example, because he is not sufficiently skilled in philosophical thinking, or because my understanding is simply a modern formulation of the ancient idea. This is the meaning of the midrash about Moses in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall. And this is also what Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook wrote to the descendants of the Sochatchover Rebbe about their grandfather: that Rabbi Abraham never said anything he had not heard from his rabbi, but it is also said that he said things no ear had ever heard. He heard from his rabbi things that no other ear had ever heard, including his rabbi’s own ear. This is not mysticism but the simple experience of every student who studied under a rabbi. Search here for my comments on the dispute between the Seridei Esh and Rabbi Yehoshua Hutner regarding Rabbi Chaim in Maimonides.
2. The implications are for philosophy of science, not for scientific theories themselves. Philosophy of science revolves almost entirely around David Hume’s problem of induction. In my view, this is the only possible solution to it. I elaborated on this throughout the entire quartet and in Truth and Unstable.