Kant wanted to redefine morality

Kant wanted to redefine morality in ways that lessened the importance of self denial.
This effected the world of Musar [Jewish Ethics] where fasting and self denial became considered less important. So to some degree you can see that the Musar movement was based on the Old Testament and Oral Law but also you can see it  gained lots of Kantian elements and also other elements from other streams of thought. The Kantian elements are perhaps more in accord with the Talmud. But the memes from other streams of thought seem foreign to me and more based on the Sitra Achra than on Torah.

In short, whatever is left of the Musar movement today has been so infected with foreign elements it scarcely has any resemblance to what the original books of Musar were talking about.

Blacks are the masters, and whites are the slaves.

Isaiah Berlin explained this best by the idea of negative rights. Negative rights are things like what we have in the Bill of Rights. Things that government can not do. This can be expanded to what other people can not take from you. But today when instead of negative rights, we have positive rights, that creates slavery.If someone has a right to things like housing or food, then that means other are forced -forced labor- to provide it. Forced labor is what is usually called ''slavery.'' And so now Blacks are the masters, and whites are the slaves.


Right do exist in Nature. They are the more modern way that ''natural law'' exists. That is;- instead of saying "Thou shalt not steal," John Locke used a concept that means in essence the same thing, but puts the emphasis on the person himself. The ''Right'' is what the man has himself. ''Thou shalt not steal'' is what others can not do to him. He based this on Natural Law which began with Saadia Gaon and the Rambam, and was developed in detail by Aquinas.

I could say simply to read the Two Treaties of Government by John Locke, but even there he does not spell this all out in simple words, so I thought it is upon me to explain this.

Really you have to go in your mind to consider  the "State of Nature." In the "State of Nature" man has full rights. But there is a disadvantage. He can not protect himself. Even the strongest man needs to sleep. Thus, in order to form a community, man gives up some of his rights --property etc., whatever is necessary in order to form that community;- so that the rest of his rights and person will be protected.

This concept of rights is the exact opposite of Rousseau. The John Locke concept gave birth to the American Democracy.  The Rousseau  concept of the "general will" [where the community has all the rights, and give only what it wants to the individual] gave birth to totalitarianism.

Slogans are important. Men's minds are ruled by slogans. Thus I though to suggest two simple slogans. One for the above essay and another for women.

To put this all into a simple slogan: "Black is Ugly"

You could add another complementary slgan for women "Fat is Ugly and Disgusting." 

[In any case this is a very brief account. And you can not learn this in philosophy courses nor in political science. You have got to trace the development of the ideas yourself from Saadia and Maimonides through Aquinas to John Locke and the read very carefully the Two Treaties along with the whole context of the state of nature thinker Hobbes.  Or you can take my word for it that John Locke's approach is the polar opposite of Rousseau.]

" Remember the Law of Moses"

At a certain point you have to stand for what you believe in. The very end of the prophets Malachi ends his prophecy with: " Remember the Law of Moses" {In Hebrew that is: "Remember the Torah of Moshe"}. There is so much idolatry that has sunk into what is called Judaism --especially in the religious world that at some point you have to draw the line.
I mean we have a good idea of what the Law of Moses says. And it is fairly clear that worship of human beings does not have much place in it. That is to say I just have to agree with the Gra that something is wrong with worship of people and I think he was right for putting that group into excommunication. This may not be a popular opinion but still it seems to me clear as day.

i recall a beggar woman in the neighborhood of Geula who told me Moses came to her in a dream and asked her: "What is it about my book that people do not like? why don't they pay attention to what I wrote?"  So every day as she was sitting there, she would read the book of Deuteronomy.

Ideas in Tracate Bava Metzia  

I need to look over the ideas on page 104. Today it looks to me that what I wrote was sloppy logic on that page concerning an answer to the Rambam. I might just erase it. It is that part where I talk about הפרישה on the Tur. But looking at it again it seems it might make sense. After all if there is no work to be done then the צמית serf ought to just pay according to the amount the field was approximated to yield according to present conditions.  But with no Gemara Bava Metzia or Tur to look it up I can not tell.


 I recall that my learning partner had suggested this and I also saw something like it in the "Prisha." But to be quite honest it seems really funny to me. To me. it seems that if you pay a percent then you pay a percent. If a fixed amount then it is  a fixed amount. I am tempted to throw out that whole paragraph.

Thinking about it today I might leave it in the book. The thing is it is  a proposed answer to the Rambam. But there might be a better solution. Perhaps based on the fact is that I noticed already that the two statements of Rav Papa contradict.

[After the above i think I corrected it and made a link to the new version. Still it would be nice to have a Lithuanian Yeshiva or Beit Midrash where I could go to look this up.]

Music for the glory of God

r60 G minor q96 e major [q96 midi] r61 D major  midi [r61 nwc]

r3   

 [r3 midi]  [r3 nwc]

r60 midi  [r60 nwc]

 Kant and Hegel are complementary and not in opposition.  I mean if we take the schemata of Kant which are clearly the thing that combines the pure concept with the intuition, it seems like we have a kind of synthesis that would look very familiar from the  standpoint of Hegel. Similar but not the same. For Hegel you have see some kind of conflict in the concept itself and then to find some synthesis. Still it is tantalizing to consider how close Kant and Hegel might really be.
And this one small kernel might have further implications. For example the focus and center of weight of morals to Kant is the individual. To Hegel it the larger group. When you consider the idea of Ontological undecidability where the center of mass is neither the subject nor the object it seems this would apply here also with there being a ground of morals that is not in the individual nor the super-organism.


The way to go about this to make  synthesis is by Dr Kelly Ross.
The thing he noticed is that after space has become something it still needs space to exist in. negative transcendence. [That is we know space is something. Not just because of Einstein but also the Bohm Effect ] Dr Ross build from there is eight modes of necessity. In any case what I would like to do is to see  how Hegel could fit with this.

religious teachers triy to present a face of family values.

Keeping Torah is largely an individual endeavor. The religious teachers  try to present a face of family values. This is largely a farce used to entice people. Thus one usually finds that connection with what he or she thought was a Torah keeping community that the community is at odds with Torah. And it provides dead weight towards any attempt to keep Torah honestly.
The religious world communities are set up for the sake of the reproductive success of the head macho man and his henchmen. Not for Torah.
They can even tend to be quite anti Torah in practice.

The truth is however going to an authentic Litvak yeshiva can be a great help if your commitment is really towards the Torah itself.And if you have something like that around then I highly recommend it.


[The difference is this: religious teachers  typically pretend to know that which they do not know. They re pseudo intellectuals in that sense. Lithuanian kinds of yeshivas are in general based on people that do know what they claim to know.]