Further Discussion

Lee Price at 09:11 on 27 May
The situations of Cain and Abraham are different in many respects, but I see one major similarity. Abraham is attached to his son in a way which is by definition "selfish." That is to say, he loves his son particularly and specifically; it is a strong feeling emanating from Abraham's individuality, from his "self." (Contrast this with the respect he showed the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah because they were human.) Cain hates his brother, also a strong feeling emanating from the individual on a particular and specific basis. I am suggesting that the move away from these strong "self"-ish feelings is the same in both cases: would light up the same neurons in the same parts of the brain. Then one is freer to see either God's will and/or the good more clearly.

Lenny Levin at 09:30 on 27 May
Now we are getting to the bottom of the issue! The conflict you are describing is the conflict between one's selfish interest and what one perceives as one's moral obligation. Conscience commands Abraham to overcome his love for his son; conscience similarly commands Cain to overcome his hatred for his brother.

But the distinction "autonomous/heteronomous" cuts differently: Is the basis of the moral command itself in the human being's own moral sense (whether reason or empathy), or in a divine command that contradicts the human-based moral sense? In this respect, the divine command that Abraham must contend with is heteronomous, whereas the call of conscience (that he is his brother's keeper, despite his disclaimer) -- the basis for which God holds him responsible -- is the universal innate moral sense that is autonomous.

Lenny Levin at 09:35 on 27 May
I will also dissociate WTC 9/11 from the other cases (qualifying my previous comment). Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atta were false prophets, because they mistakenly projected their hatred for the United States onto God, thus generating a false commandment to kill the infidels. We must go deeper into religious-ethical psychology whether to classify the command "kill the infidel" as autonomous (because it reflects the human hatred for the enemy) or heteronomous (because it contradicts the universal rational ethical dictate not to murder). My previous comment assumes the latter position, but I will leave the matter on the table for now.

Comments on the Last Post (from Facebook)

I am sharing here a discussion of my last post that occurred on Facebook:

Susan Elkodsi at 20:18 on 24 May
I like your approach. But WWMS? What would Maimonides say?

Lenny Levin at 10:06 on 25 May
Maimonides never resolved the tension between a perfect God (I:50-60, III:16) and an imperfect world (III, 8-12). Modern process theology, affirming the fact-map of modern physics and the spirit of the Bible, avoids the perfection of "Being" in favor of the messiness of "becoming." But the attempt to integrate the fact-assertions of science with the value-assertions of the Bible is very Maimonidean.

Mel Scult at 10:11 on 25 May
Len is a scholar, translator, writer thinker and a very good person. Because his deeds match his wisdom , his wisdom will endure. [ Mel Scult, speaking for the universe]

Lenny Levin at 10:26 on 25 May
Aw, shucks! Enough flattery. But does the argument hold water?

Lee Price at 14:57 on 25 May
From your blog:“'Autonomous' refers to the view that human beings can perceive the good through their own reason, precisely because the good is an independent quality."
I would want to pause right there to question whether reason is the best instrument for perceiving the good.

Lenny Levin at 15:57 on 25 May
Right-brain, left-brain, empathy -- as long as it is determined from the human side, these all count as "autonomous." Philosophers stress reason, but we can include these other factors as well. As opposed to: "Abraham conquered his fatherly love in order to serve You (at the Akeda)" which would be the extreme of heteronomy.

Susan Elkodsi at 08:29 on 25 May
So can I quote that in my (late) paper? It seems to me that Halevi did a better job of synthesizing faith and reason. Good may be perceived through reason, but it is also often a leap of faith that we behave the way we do. (IMHO)

Lee Price at 20:27 on 25 May
How does one conquer a fatherly love, especially "in order to serve" God? Seems to me before the hand reaches the knife in any way Jewish tradition would accept, the heteronomous must become equivalent to the autonomous. The very same movement of the soul, if you will, would apply to Cain were he actually to overcome sin. He too would have to conquer a strong emotion. Wherever the energy to make the change is perceived to emanate from (God outside, the better person within) I'm not sure there's an essntial difference.

Lenny Levin at 09:45 on 26 May
"The heteronomous must become equivalent to the autonomous." Hmm. You realize this is all based on the notion expressed in Pirkei Avot 2:4 "Make His will your will...Annul your will in favor of His will..."—ultimately, adopt God's will as your will. So God's will does become your will. But it becomes your will because you have accepted God's will, not because your innate criterion of the good led you to adopt that specific course of action or principle on its own merits. The example of the Akeda—as Kierkegaard correctly picked up—is supposed to shock us into the realization of how contradictory the heteronomous and autonomous viewpoints can actually be in practice. The analogue today is the WTC attack on 9/11. The case of Cain is fundamentally different, because even as his selfish will moves him to kill Abel, his own conscience (expressing true autonomous peception of the good) knows that to kill Abel would be wrong.

What Does the Bible Say?

God <—?—> good

Does God dictate the good? Or does God instruct us in the good because it is good? Which is the mainstream view of the Bible on this question we have been pursuing?

In all frankness, both views are present in the Bible. Precisely because the writers and editors of the Bible were not philosophers, and did not leave anything out of their compendium, they did not see as clearly as a philosopher would to the core of this question or present a clearly unified view on it. But they did have strong intuitions on it, which they expressed through the literary means at their disposal—narrative, poetry, and exhortation. These intuitions cut in both directions, as we have seen. Had they been philosophically aware, they might have declared the problem to be an “antinomy”—a dilemma between two opposing views, in which equally cogent arguments can be brought for each side.

The terms “autonomous” and “heteronomous” were introduced into this discussion by the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, and also pervade the discussion of Isaac Heinemann in The Reasons for the Commandments to which I have already referred. “Autonomous” refers to the view that human beings can perceive the good through their own reason, precisely because the good is an independent quality. “Heteronomous” refers to the view that we need to rely on an external authority—such as God, a parent, or a political ruler—to tell us what is good.

Some people have a negative stereotype of the Bible that it is thoroughly heteronomous in its presentation of the good and why we should obey it. Following Heinemann, we shall here portray Jewish thought on the subject—from the Bible through the rabbis and the medieval and modern thinkers—as a dialectic of the autonomous and heteronomous. We shall go further and ask, what different forms did this dialectic take through the ages, and what options does this history offer us for our own understanding of the problem?

We review the examples we have already cited. Abraham challenging God before Sodom “Shall not the judge of all the earth do justice?” was clearly expressing the autonomous perspective. God, warning Cain “Sin crouches at the door, its urge is toward you but you may master it,” was encouraging Cain to act on his autonomous moral insight, without having to be told specifically “Do not murder.” But God commanding Adam and Eve “Do not eat of it,” and demanding that Abraham present Isaac as a sacrifice, was taking the heteronomous stance, laying down commands without justifying them by reasons.

The early 20th century Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen detected a difference in tone in the two presentations of the Ten Commandments — in Exodus Chapters 19–20 and 24, and in Deuteronomy Chapters 4–5. In Exodus, God stuns the people with the impressive spectacle of a desert thunderstorm; they are overwhelmed by God’s show of power and accept without reservation anything God will say to them. But in Deuteronomy, Moses stresses the rational aspect of the commandments: “What nation has such righteous laws and judgments as all this Torah that I give you today?” The nations, on hearing it, will say, “Surely this is a wise and understanding nation!”

Indeed, at least one modern Orthodox Jewish thinker has asserted that from a traditional Jewish point of view, even the ethical dictates of the Torah should be accepted in a spirit of passive obedience, as if they were hukkim (divine dictates without reasons). This is heteronomy with a vengeance. If this were Judaism, it would not be a teaching that I could accept. I also maintain (with Heinemann) that this betrays the spirit of the tradition itself, which is far more complex and nuanced in its approach.

The World As God’s Creative Project

The editor of the Biblical narrative in Genesis and Exodus presents us with a view that is neither precisely autonomous nor heteronomous in its implications. The term “theonomous” which David Novak has proposed is useful in indicating this dialectical synthesis, but we must go further. An “ethic of creation” (a term Lawrence Troster proposes) is here combined with the familiar “ethic of revelation.”

The historical narrative is framed by the creation narrative of the opening chapters. God creates. God declares in various stages of creation, “Let there be…” and it was so. And at each stage God examines the result, “and it was good.”

What means “and God saw that it was good”? Does it mean God declared it to be good, and thus legislated it to be good? Or did God, knowing what “good” was, judge that this product conformed to the outside criterion of good? If we adopt either of these views, we are back at our original problem. But I do not think either is satisfactory, and wish to propose a third view.

God (as portrayed in Genesis—admittedly anthropomorphically) is an artist. God has a creative intention, but cannot express it except through the act of creation itself. When an artist creates, s/he does not know in advance what will eventuate, but feels intuitively an impulse to arrive at a certain X. The artist produces something, then stands back and appraises it. Does the product (still half-formed) measure up to the inarticulate creative intention? Sometimes yes, sometimes not at all, and most often yes in part, but still needs improvement.

“God saw that it was good” expresses: God judged, yes, this fulfills my creative intention, at least up to this point. “God saw that it was very good” expresses: Now I have it! Now it is a complete and adequate expression of what I intended, or nearly so—needs just a crowning touch (maybe a Sabbath, to put the icing on the cake).

What does this imply in terms of human knowledge of the good? We do not need God to tell us in words “Do this, don’t do that”—or do we? It depends how good we are at intuiting God’s intention from experiencing God’s work. God apparently wanted humanity to read His mind, so He left them alone without explicit instructions for ten generations. The result was a disaster. People were clueless. They didn’t know which way to turn, and so they turned on each other. God gave in to despair for the first and last time, and wiped the slate clean, to start over. After the Flood, He gave Noah’s family a basic operating guide to living decently in the world. When that wasn’t enough, He gave the Israelites, fourteen generations later, more detailed instructions at Sinai.

But the instructions were not constitutive of the good. The good is constituted by God’s creative act. It is implicit in the world God made. The explicit instructions are a commentary on creation, to help those of us who cannot “get it” otherwise.

God gave us reason, to figure out the meaning of creation by contemplating it. God also (to anticipate Saadia Gaon’s view) gave us revelation, to inform us of the answers in case we could not figure them out for ourselves. Ultimately, the truths arrived at by reason and those offered by revelation should be in agreement. That would be the mature Jewish view, expressed by the leading Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides.

What, then, is good? Good is a dynamic function of the world created by God. Good can be intuited from contemplating the world itself. But the most profound understanding of the good comes from viewing the world as the ongoing expression of God’s will. Embracing the good is thus guided by reason, but it aims at compliance with God’s will as apprehended by reason (and hopefully confirmed by the purported account of God’s revelation of God’s will).

From this point of view, the dilemma of the Euthyphro (is good perceived by reason? Or is it compliance with God’s will?) is overcome in mature Jewish thought.

Euthyphro in Genesis? (2)

Merrymarymarry’s comments are to the point – thank you!

We can discern the two approaches to our basic question already in the first few chapters of Genesis. God’s first command to Adam and Eve appears arbitrary – do it because I say so! (God determines the good.) But Cain’s sin was not against statutory law, but against moral common sense: he was expected to know murder was wrong without being explicitly told. (The good is independently defined.) This distinction would later be elaborated by the rabbis into the difference between hukkim (arbitrary laws) and mishpatim (laws expressing the dictates of reason). The history of these two approaches in later Jewish thought is elaborated by Isaac Heinemann in The Reasons for the Commandments.

Merrymarymarry touches on another possibility—to transcend this dichotomy and merge God (or God’s dictates) and the good into one. I agree that this is the highest wisdom that we hopefully get to in the end. But I think it’s important to go through all the intermediate steps of thought that tilt toward one or the other side, to appreciate all the nuances of truth that each has to offer.

Take today’s debates on public policy — whether on abortion, global politics, or the place of religion in public life. The evangelicals hold by Euthyphro’s position, that the Word of God ought to determine what we do. The secular liberals hold that invoking God has no place in these debates, that we should decide what is good on the basis of reason alone.

Each of these contemporary positions has its roots in recent history, especially the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment and its aftermath. The Enlightenment had its roots in the religious wars from the Reformation through the Thirty Years’ War (ending in 1648). In those wars, oceans of blood were shed over who had the right version or interpretation of God’s word. Progressive anti-clerical thinkers such as Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire and Diderot drew the moral that it is all too easy to invent spurious claims of God’s word to support one’s own interested position. Only objective reason could be trusted as a guide in human affairs.

But using reason as a guide was far more complicated in practice than in theory. The French Revolution started in a promising fashion but culminated in the Terror of 1793. The Russian Revolution similarly promised to implement reason in human affairs, but it ended up in the Gulag of Stalinism. Each of these produced a religious reaction, among those who drew the moral that religion was a better guide to right living than human reason on its own.

I just want to add one more wrinkle at this point: Does “determining the good by reason” mean the same thing if one considers the moral problem in purely human terms, or in a world governed by God? How do we justify our moral logic if we assume that we are legislating morals just for humanity, in a godless universe? Is the equation appreciably changed if we assume, instead of a godless universe, a universe guided by divine purpose?

In my next post, I will address how the question “God —? — good” was addressed in Biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish thought.

Euthyphro in Genesis — Sodom or the Akedah?

God <–?–> good

Is there philosophy in the Bible? A parallel between a Platonic dialogue and two Biblical stories will shed light on this question.

Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro is named for a brash young man who thinks he has all the answers, and that the gods agree with him. He has decided to prosecute his father for murder. His father had shackled a laborer who in a drunken rage had slit a domestic’s throat; while he went to inquire what to do with him, the laborer died in the shackles. The son, ignoring the extenuating circumstances—as well as the honor he owes his father—is bringing murder charges against his father. His kin tell him that to prosecute his father in this case (maybe in any case) is unholy. How little do they know about what is holy, Euthyphro protests!

Socrates asks him: What, then, is holy? Euthyphro answers: The holy is what the gods desire. Socrates and Euthyphro go on to debate the merits of two opposing positions: (1) X is holy because the gods desire it, or (2) The gods desire X because it is holy in and of itself. Socrates’ view prevails: the good or holy is an independent variable, independent of the desire of the gods, and the gods love it because it is good or holy.

Two stories of Genesis seem to present the two sides of the argument of the Euthyphro. In the story of Abraham arguing before God about the fate of Sodom and Gommorah, Abraham proposes that God should spare the cities if there are fifty—or forty-five, forty, thirty…even ten righteous in the city. “Shall the judge of the earth not do justice?” Yet a few chapters later, God commands Abraham: “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to Mount Moriah and offer him as a sacrifice on one of the hills that I shall show you.”

In the first case, Abraham points out the good to God and says, “See, that is the good! You, God, are bound by it!” In the second case, God says to Abraham: “I’ll show you what’s good—it’s whatever I ask of you!”

In comparing Plato and Genesis, we notice similarities and differences. Each is concerned about God, the good, and the relation between them. What is God? What is the good? Which drives which?

But there is a difference in the method of treatment. The conceptual tool-kit of Plato’s Euthyphro is predominantly left-brain: definitions, abstractions, deductions, long trains of arguments striving for consistency. The conceptual tool-kit of the Genesis stories (and of the Bible generally) is predominantly right-brain: narrative (in which the universal ideas are implicit), poetry, illuminations of insight in which the logical preparation (if any) remains hidden from view.

There is also a difference in the final stated (or implied) position. In Euthyphro (and in philosophy generally), reason is the arbiter: we know the good from reason, and even a purported “word of God” that tells us differently is regarded with suspicion. In the Bible, obedience to the “word of God” predominates. Yet there are important passages (such as Abraham’s colloquy with God before Sodom) where the human ability to perceive the good independently of God’s word is given significant weight.

Are the Bible and philosophy in conflict, or complementary? As a great deal of Western thought springs from the extended conversation between these two, a lot hinges on how we perceive the answer to this question.

(To be continued)

Inaugurating "Reblen: The Blog"

As I embark on the next chapter of my life devoted to pursuit and sharing of wisdom, I invite my teachers, friends, and students ("from all my teachers I have gained insight!") to join me in this forum for that purpose.

I will be presenting ideas that I have developed in my teaching for the past decade, and some for much longer than that, along with relatively new ideas that have just come to me. In all these cases, I welcome friendly, constructive criticism. If I have overlooked important learning or other insights (ranging from complementary to challenging), by all means let me know — I want to learn from you too!

There will be references along the way to books that I have published or translated, to books that I am currently working on, and to books that may grow out of the postings and discussions on these blogs. If you wish to serve as a test-reader of my books-in-progress, let me know by e-mail and I will communicate with you to facilitate that.

I hope to recreate in this blog the ambience that I have strived to create in my classroom over the years: brave searching for broad vision, grappling with the big ideas, based on serious learning and critical thinking. All viewpoints are welcome. Mutual respect is a basic given. My viewpoint is my own; I welcome yours!

Ben Bag-bag said: "Turn it and turn it over, for everything is in it. Study it; grow old and grey in it, for you will find no better resource than it!" I have universalized the "it" in his statement to refer to the whole Western tradition of learning — religious and philosophical (and let's include the literary and artistic tradition as well).

In that spirit, let us begin once more to learn!