Neo Platonic thought in Jewish thinkers Maimonides and the Duties of the Heart.
 and the problem of how to reconcile Plotinus with Jewish  thought.
It is hard for me to not see a strain of the thought of Plotinus in Maimonides . I think that we can all admit that Plotinus is much more in agreement with the Torah.[note 1]
My thoughts:
(1) We see Neoplatonic thought often in Maimonides. As a  support we can see that Maimonides considered knowledge of Physics and Metaphysics as the path to attachment and knowledge of God. This is a powerful and clear a statement of a Neo Platonic belief system.
(2) To the Rambam  knowing creates connection with the known. "Knowledge and the knower and the known are one." This is straightforward Plotinus. Otherwise there is no reason to expect that since I know anything about an orange that that should make me an orange.
(3) Maimonides:  one's portion in the next world depends on "sechel hanikne" שכל הנקנה [acquired intelligence]  and expands on it to include the idea that one must know this acquired intelligence with one "yedia" (ידיעה)[one act of knowing]. This is a move of Christian Mediaeval thinkers that tried to get Plotinus's multiplicity of ideas to fit into the oneness of the Creator. They had thought that they had successes in this, but it seems to me that Maimonides and Aquinas must have felt the lack of logical rigor in this attempt, and so made the move towards a more radical Aristotelian approach.

(4) Maimonides  has a rigorous self consistent system (With the Rambam at least we know he had a system This is easy to see when we consider Reb Chaim Soloveitchik and his work on the Rambam's Mishna Torah. It is too bad he did not do the same thing with the Guide but at least we can know that in potential such a thing is possible)


But it is my personal belief that both of these thinkers could be shown to be rigorous if someone would spend the time and effort to show it like Chaim Soloveitchik did with the Mishna Torah of Maimonides.


This has seemed irrelevant for most people for about two hundred years since reason itself has been under attack. But if Reason ever regains its prestige [as it seems to be doing in modern day philosophers like Kelly Ross and Michael Huemer] then the issues that were burning intense issues of metaphysics will become  in the future also burning and relevant issues. The nice thing will be that there will be Kant and  and later thinkers like Otto, and Nelson  to help create a consistent logical Torah approach.

I mean philosophers have spend plenty of time trying to make adolescent-rage philosophers like Nietzsche logical and rigorous. It is not time to give Maimonides?

[note 1] The trouble with the Divine Mind also is troublesome for Quantum Mechanics. No one can know the state of the electron before it is measured,--even the Divine Mind.  We know Schopenhauer was going with the Ding An Sich [singular] as the Will and I was pretty happy about that 

Laws do not change in meaning over time

In the conservative shuls/synagogues  they count women as part of a minyan. I see this is the difference between me and Conservative Judaism.. I agree to change Shulchan Aruch based Judaism-but I change it based on internal sources like the Talmud or other internal sources of authority. [This is like the  book of the Supreme Court Justice Scalia that sets out the legal philosophy, called "textual original-ism," which says judges should adhere strictly to the text of laws and give them the meaning understood by the people who adopted them. Laws do not change in meaning over time, they contend.]
Part of my approach to how I would modify the Shulchan Aruch would be to notice the argument between the Rambam and the Raavad about rabbinical laws.
The  Rambam holds rabbinical decrees do not lose their force when the reason for them drops off. The Raavad disagrees with this, and Tosphot also disagrees with the Raavad. (Any place in Shas where this issue comes up, Tosphot says this.)
So decrees of the Sages are highly connected to the reason they were made. That would mean that some laws of Shulchan Aruch would automatically change if the circumstances changed.
[When I say Shulchan Aruch I mean the four volume book by Joseph Karo written in Safed about 500 years ago, along with his commentaries-the Shach, Taz, Magen Avraham, etc. It is a very large book and to go through it takes a lot of time.


As for the contention of Supreme Court Justice Scalia, I think he is right. Laws don't change meaning over time.  But he is referring to the laws of the Constitution of the USA. And that has a different ground of validity.
The ground of the Constitution is Natural Law and the contract theory of John Locke.
The Supreme Court justices are thinking in different terms than people involved with Torah think.
They might be considering the fact that if they people pass laws that are bad for them "Who are we to disagree?"  I don't know if there is a name for this but  it could be called "judicial minimalism."
They might be thinking if the people don't like the laws passed by the Congress and signed by the president it is their prerogative to get themselves a different Congress and a different president.
They get this chance every four years. And perhaps now would be the time to start preparing. After all more than 50% of Americans believe in conservative values. Why should it be so hard to get a president who respects those values?

One of the ways that I disagree with  the  Ultra Orthodox is in the issues of: (1) Anachronism, (2) Objective moral values, (3) Divine Command theory.
(1) Anachronism. While I agree there is great value in the Talmud, but I do not see it as the system of law that was in place during the time of the prophets of Israel.
(2) Right and wrong are not  dependent on what people think.  Nor do they depend of social conditions or upbringing. They are not relative. The reason this is so is that relative morality is logically incoherent. It can not claim its own truth without contradicting itself.

(3) G-d commands us things to do in the Torah because these things correspond to a natural order that he created. They are not good because he commanded them, and they are not arbitrary.



Abuses of rabbinic power are swept under the surface. It is hard for a person who wants a clean conscious to be part of a word that has a guilty conscious and is more afraid of the light of truth than the darkness of lies.

The reason it seems to me that people are afraid of the truth is because in fact as Nietzsche said "the truth is terrible." We live in a harsh world and we ourselves from the aspect of our animal nature are terrible beings. And we use the appearance of  morality to cover up our savage, cunning, violent, lustful, sadistic nature. But what makes this all the more terrible is the meaningless aspect of it. We are in a desperate search for meaning. So    the  Ultra Orthodox world will do anything to guard the sanctuary of what they think gives them meaning. This is where I disagree with them. In this issue I am a monotheist--God gives me meaning. I do not need to find it anywhere else.

Values, if they are objective, can't be Jewish. There can't be Jewish chemistry or Jewish mathematics.

Values, if they are objective, can't be Jewish. There can't be Jewish chemistry or Jewish mathematics. Even if Jews do these things, that does not make them Jewish. And even if only Jews did them, they still would not be Jewish. Only subjective values can be Jewish. The reason we learn Torah is that because of the evil inclination it is hard for an person to discover on his own true objective values. So we need to learn Torah to discover these values. [The move to disregard Divine ideas (Plotinus) to preserve Divine simplicity in Aquinas caused reason to no longer be the criteria of morality, but rather the Divine Will. This was a mistake.  At least, to my relief, Maimonides preserved a lot of neo Platonic thought.

[But I can't prove that he did so with logical rigor. I hope someday some one will do the same job on the Guide that Chaim Soloveitchik did on the Mishna Torah. Before Reb Chaim people believed the Rambam was rigorous even thought it seems to be full of contradictions. Reb Chaim proved it is rigorous.]

However if someone would say, "Then, fine. Jewish values are subjective.-So what?

Then it will follow that if we all took an attitude of approval towards Adolf Hitler, then Adolf Hitler would be good. Beside this, there are other objections to subjective values. [See Kelly Ross, Michael Huemer, John Searle.]
I think it is important to note that to the Rambam [Maimonides], the values of the Torah are objective and not observer dependent.

[Kelly Ross does defend Divine Command theory but I have not gotten a chance yet to see how he does it.]

So in short my attitude about moral values is this: Moral values are objective. They are embedded in reality. They are not observer dependent. And they are known by reason. Torah is to help us to know moral values that we would automatically know if not that the evil inclination affects our reasoning.

[Some people think belief in some system or other is the most important thing. This is found by religious people of most denominations. That is they put faith in their system above what reason perceives as moral value. That is not my approach. And I think it is not the Torah approach either according to Saadia Gaon or Maimonides. But this faith based approach did become the universal approach of religious people across all spectra.

There are too many subjects to write about today. so just a quick list as a reminder. [1] The very important argument between Nietzsche and  the Ari  concerning the Will. With Nietzsche it causes nothing and is just a effect of deeper things happening under the surface. The known will is just indicative of which one of the lower level wills beats the others. (Leiter, the foremost Nietzsche scholar, thinks there are several possible approaches to Nietzsche's opinion about the will. But at least we know he is disagreeing with Schopenhauer). To sum it up: To Nietzsche neither the will nor consciousness causes anything.
To  the Ari the Will is everything. It breaks through all barriers. It is clearly a causative agent. And I agree with this. I think modern psychology has way too much accepted the doctrines and Nietzsche and not realized that the will has the ability to overcome all personal flaws and mental problems. [Though they dress their guesses in scientific language to impress people. Feynman openly called all social sciences pseudo sciences.]
My own opinion here is that I don't know if there really is an argument.I would first have to see which will Nietzsche is attacking. It seems to me unlikely that he is knocking the actual will of Schopenhauer (the higher Will). Sure he knocks Schopenhauer but in terms of what Schopenhauer though people know they are willing something. Not in terms of the will as the dinge als sich alein. Maybe I am wrong but it seems more likely that he is attacking the individual will, i.e. what people call their will. The more basic thing I think is going on is Nietzsche is trying to attack free will which  Ari clearly holds from.
 If you believe in free will, obviously the will is going to play a large role and not just the higher will but the individual will.


[2] The other issue I wanted to deal with is Constant the French aristocrat that saw the genius of Rousseau but also his flaws. The difference between the freedom of ancient Athens and the freedom of the moderns.


 But the pure secular is a empty of content. [I mean meaning of life type of content]  so clearly people have a good motivation in getting involved with Torah in a Lithuanian Yeshiva.
I am reminded of a televised debate [or discussion] in the 1980's between the USSR and the USA.

Someone asked a woman on the panel about their attitude towards sex in the USSR. She said, and I quote, "We don't have any sex in the USSR."
Notes
() My own perspective on this is towards the Schopenhauer and  Ari axis.
() These two subjects are related because if you think like Nietzsche that the will is nothing then free will will also mean little to you. and if free will means little then why bother letting people do what they want.? This is the reason freedom has suffered in the modern age. If people are determined then why let them be free. This is the reason why totalitarianism  of the Democrats today in America has so little appeal to me since I see freedom as a prime value.

Learning Torah according to the Gra

According to the Gra and his disciple Haim from Voloshin Learning Talmud is the goal in life.  There is no  basis in reason for this which makes it work. It is based on faith. [They have plenty of support for this thesis from the Talmud itself. But they make it more clear that what you would think from reading the Talmud. And I tend to agree with this in principle, but I have a few preconditions. Learning Torah has to be not a means of making  a living. And it should be done with Musar (books of ethics).]

The problem with this path is an test that I have. It is:  If a certain service in fact unites one with God, then it has to be visible by the person's actions. This puts a big hole in the learning Torah for money path- since there are some people for whom this does not work.

The problem is I actually felt the holiness that is at the center of the learning Talmud path. So I do not want to discount it. Rather, I think when the Torah is used as a mode to be making money, it turns into its opposite. It becomes a source of negative value.


My own idea here is that the one highest service to God is what is called in Torah, "Attachment with God" (or as this is often referred to as the Highest Awe of God. In my way of thinking all services of God are to bring to attachment with God. [Attachment with God is a commandment in the Law of Moses and is mentioned twice in Deuteronomy as a command in and of itself. It is also counted in the list of the commandments of the Rambam. ]


Yet, I also have another idea which seems to contradict this. It is that a person's portion in the next world depends on his actions towards his fellow man. And that attachment with God is simply the way that one's personal actions will in fact be good and not just appear good.

So what we have is in the Torah itself there seems to be a hierarchy of value. We have the things that the Torah clearly considers to the the fundamental essence of Torah-- the Ten Commandments. However you read it these two tablets of stone are clearly the climax of the Torah and what it puts all its energy into.

The rest of the commandments are clearly secondary. But we do find that the Torah and later prophets stress keeping all the commandments which includes everything that God says in the Torah. Most have to do with building the temple and also bringing the Jewish people into the land of Israel and  laws of property and how God wants society to function when the Jews arrive in Israel

To understand the Gra and the idea that everyone word of Torah is worth more than all the mitzvot we need two things. One is to recognize that all  a person's deeds depend on what he thinks. The next step is Hegel. We can understand empirical reality to flow from the Mind. [In that way Hegel is  close to the Neo-Platonists]

[I should mention however that in Silverman yeshivas which go by the path of the Gra, they concentrate on the Tenak (Old Testament)  and Mishna.  Only after the ages of 18 or so do they start on the Gemara. And I might mention that I really loved learning Mishna with the commentary of the Rav from Bartenura. (That is the regular edition of Mishna).]



The general result of the Silverman Method is that people that graduate from the system know the Tenak [Old Testament] and the Mishna very well. Almost by heart. 

weaknesses in libertarianism

People that live under the American democracy have forgotten how precious freedom is. This is how the Democrats have been successful in undermining the American Democracy. [Clinton capped the second night of the Democratic National Convention with a rousing speech designed to remind voters of the budget surpluses and job growth he led in the 1990s during his two terms in the White House. This is a logical fallacy called a red herring. It has nothing to do with the fact that the present day president has led America into an unprecedented era of stagnation and 222 trillion dollars of debt.]


However there are weaknesses in Libertarianism {I.e. Thomas Jefferson and John Locke type of Democracy}. Ayn Rand is a gold mine of holes.
Holes in Libertarian philosophy:  the most simple of all problems is the fact that man is not a blank slate and that the social group is infinitely more important to people than self preservation or morality based on logic. People become religious fanatics every day because they don't care about rules of logic and material evidence but rather on the need to join a social group.
I.e. John Locke's idea of the blank slate is not true, and it is essential to his idea of a just government.


Also, I am bothered every single day when I see the good and bad that were part of the USSR. A determined enemy of freedom could easily find enough evidence to knock serious holes in Libertarianism.

Some of the good things the USSR were housing, central heating of whole cities from a central plant, the attempt to create a society based on justice, and not arbitrary rule of religious fanatics, their space program. Also, they seem to have been able to avoid some of the evils that are plaguing America right now-extreme addiction to law suits, an incapability to withstand the forces that are opposed to freedom and democracy from within like Muslims and the Democratic Party.


You can see a more robust libertarian approach based on nature law. At least this way we would avoid the obvious  conflict between John Locke and Darwin. That is we don't have to chuck out John Locke but we would have to modify him. And the nature law approach would help a lot of things in the USA. It would mean that people can protect themselves when government refuses to do so.
It means people have a natural right to their own property. It would eliminate the politics of the left which is based on making people angry at rich people.