Q&A: A Prophetic-Parabolic Way of Coping with Postmodern Science
A Prophetic-Parabolic Way of Coping with Postmodern Science
Question
Honorable Rabbi, hello. I think this will interest you.
A post I published about the concept of “force” in physics—about its definition, and about the connection between it and the power of God. (And about potentiality in Aristotle, the problem of induction, and a Nietzschean science from within genealogy.)
It seems to me very close to your areas of interest.
I’d really be very interested to hear your opinion!!
Many thanks,
A.
The language of prophecy and anthropomorphic science
Forget the post for a moment—listen to a story. When I was in high school I went into the physics track. The teacher, who had a PhD in physics, explained “force”: gravitational force, Newton’s laws, and so on. But I didn’t understand—what is force? Has anyone ever seen a force? In what space does it exist? Did someone hit body A and it moved at velocity x until it hit body B? Did it feel a blow? Did it hurt?
Can any of the physicists reading this post answer that?
Aristotle emphasized the concept of “potential” as expressing that which does not exist but may come to exist.
In fact, potential is not. There is only the present and a doubtful future.
The Hebrew language, when it encountered the world of physics, said “koach” (“force” / “power”), which is an anthropomorphic concept. In the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) it represents personal might and strength. In order to shape a metaphysics, the holy tongue arms itself with humanity, with the form of a human being toward whom moral relation is directed, and in that form God appears to His prophets.
David Hume undermines induction—the projection from the present to the future—and says that we infer inductively only out of habit. No one has logically proven that the sun will rise tomorrow.
But phenomenologically (that is, experientially) we feel a force upon our consciousness that compels us to accept induction as a starting assumption. Experientially, we experience the divine force that sustains the world striking our consciousness and compelling us to act within a relationship with that force. We experience the world as meaningful and not arbitrary. We enter into a relationship with God.
The Platonic ideas narrowed this perception. They relied on the power of the gods. Indeed, as the Euthyphro problem showed, many gods cannot provide confidence in divine speech and in a relationship with it. Each god has his own will. Nietzsche’s demand to return to a living science—not one that merely drills patterns of thought established by geniuses—would be answered very well by a science that sees “force” as force, the power of a god, a measure of might that sets rules for the world of revelation.
(Of course, this is speaking of a transcendent God, whom we know only by feeling His presence in prayer that rises from below to above. The psalm preceded prophecy, and prophecy preceded science. Prayer is the essence of human existence that precedes cognition: “But I am prayer.”)
Answer
Hello, A.
It’s hard for me to distill from this a concrete claim. There are a few sentence fragments here that I have reservations about, but I’m not sure I understood what you wanted to say.
As for contradictions (as with Spinoza), I’m not in favor of idealizing them. A contradiction may perhaps indicate a distress or tension, but in itself it says nothing, and it is not correct to infer anything from it.
I’ve just published another post that supplements and clarifies the matter of prayer in divine apprehension—regarding the Parmenidean contradiction between fleeting experiences and the eternal infinity supposedly grasped by the intellect. I mapped these ideas onto Spinoza, who adopted the Parmenidean view in many respects. And I received support from the words of Professor Menachem Lorberbaum—that the core of Maimonides’ view is also by way of liturgical poetry: “We Have Conquered Through His Pleasantness” (the title of Lorberbaum’s book).
When Spinoza prayed to the blessed Lord…
Spinoza, like a religious person, was in the end a poet. He sometimes held that the attributes constitute the substance, and sometimes he said that substance is grasped only through itself, and that the attributes are only what the intellect apprehends about it from its own side. So is the substance the world, or is it by itself alone? This contradiction is a wonderful oxymoron—like saying “deafening silence,” just like saying “God (a transcendent concept) exists (an immanent concept).” Therefore, in order to be Spinoza, one first has to be educated as a religious youth in the Jewish community, and to recite liturgical poems and hymns of praise to the transcendent God who acts within this world.