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30.1.17

trust in God --the message of Navardok (Musar)

Since there is a deeper kind of knowledge beyond empirical knowledge and reason that both empirical knowledge and knowledge based on reason depend on for their ground of validity-therefore that ground conditions  reality. Faith. 
This explains what you see in the Altar of Navardok in terms of his trust in God when he was in the forest in his hut there and learning Torah, and in the middle of the night his candle ran out and someone knocked on his door and handed to him   new candle. Faith determines reality. [The Altar of Navardok, Reb Joseph Yozel Horvitz, was a disciple of Reb Israel Salanter.]

In short what I am saying here is that there is knowledge which is not derived from experience [five senses] nor from reason. Faith.  And the claim is that faith is a deeper sort of knowledge than reason. So I am adopting a version of Kant's principle that phenomena must be conditioned by the structure of knowledge. I am going a bit further and saying that both knowledge and also phenomena must be conditioned according to faith. This is a simple one step further than Kant.

But to the Rambam and Hegel,  Faith and reason are not two things. They are the same essence but differ in degree.