modern progressivism is modern "regressivism."

Modern progressivism is modern "regressivism." So what can you do? The Litvak Yeshiva solution is simply to go back to the Middle Ages--and that in fact makes a lot of sense on one hand. But it does not answer the very questions that led to dissatisfaction with scholasticism and religion in the first place.

So my solution is more modest--to find a world view that works for me and helps me make sense of a confusing world.

So I try to hold to a kind of common sense approach of Reid towards philosophy-as are some modern day philosophers like Kelley Ross, Michael Huemer, maverick philosopher and others.

Common sense and balance and to be a mensch are definitely the values of my parents. So what that means in a practical sense is to learn from the greats of the Middle Ages,and also advances from the Enlightenment. How to make sense of the contradictions? Use common sense and balance.

Just to be clear, though I am no expert, I did the usual adolescent reading of Nietzsche, the Communist Manifesto,  and all the usual progressive stuff.  Being not so smart, I could not really see what was wrong with their arguments, but it all seemed way too shallow as compared to other reading I was doing, Plato, Spinoza, Dante, etc. [Now it would be fairly straightforward to see what was incorrect in Marx Freud, Nietzsche etc. But that is not the reason I did not go after them. The reason was they all seemed so "19th century like" obsolete and irrelevant. As if making revolution and sex free was going to solve all mankind's problems. They seemed -forgive the expression--naive.
Just the opposite with Plato and Dante etc. They seemed extremely relevant and deep and penetrating into the core of issues.

You do not have to be an expert

Winston Churchill said something along the lines that everyone needs at least one hobby [or more] I forget the quote. But this brings me to what I have been trying to say about Math, Physics, and Learning Torah. You do not have to be an expert. And besides that Torah was never meant to be a paying profession anyway. And even though one can get paid for math and Physics still than does not mean you need to be an expert.

There is such a thing as doing something "Lishma" for its own sake.

The way to understand this is by the Gra [the Gaon of Vilna]who brings the Jerusalem Talmud that says that every word of learning Torah is worth more than all the other commandments of the Torah put together. [The Jerusalem (jerusalem Talmud) brings this from a verse כל חפצים לא ישוו בה(all desired things can not be compared with God's Wisdom)]
The way to get to the idea that that includes math and Physics is through the rishonim. Most books of Musar from the period of the Middle Ages have physics and metaphysics as being a part of God's Wisdom.


I also have to say that if you learn  bu just saying the words and going on, you will eventually understand a lot more than you can even imagine now. See Talk 76 of Rav Nahman of Breslov.

[I might add that Rav Nahman also makes a good case for why Torah is no supposed to be a paid profession. Even though he does not discuss the issue directly, still he points out the problems created by such a system. In fact, my learning partner in Uman was always telling me how wonderful it is to be in an area with no religious controls.]

to learn in depth

The main way of learning Torah that I think is the best is one that most people coming into the Litvak Yeshiva world find impossible to accept --that is to learn in depth even before you have gone through Shas even once. I mentioned this one time to David Bronson and he agreed with me. The reason is simple experience. If people do not learn "how to learn" [that is how to get into the depths of Talmud] right away, then they never get it.

And I admit my first years in Shar Yashuv were frustrating for this very reason. There was a great insistence to get into the depths of learning the Gemara and Tosphot even before you had even finished the tractate itself.

But how to get into the depths of learning is hard to know. I have mentioned Rav Shach's Avi Ezri which is of course an amazing masterpiece. But the type of learning of Rav Shach is different than what they were doing in Shar Yashuv. Not that they conflict, but they are simply different.
The path of Shar Yashuv was more along the lines of what is called in Israel "calculating the sugia" (sugia means the subject matter right on the page, but it also can mean that subject as relevant to other places in the Talmud.]: getting Tosphot--every word, and not going on until you do. Rav Shach and Rav Haim Soloveitchik are more interested in global issues: how does one sugia compare to another?

Modern pseudo scientists. The pretense of being able to understand the human soul and to diagnose its ills and cure them is as old as medicine itself.

For some reason people think that going to witch doctors will cure their nervousness or arrays of mental problems. Clearly this cure has never happened nor will it ever. Psychology is just a way to milk people out of their money by pretending to know something about the human soul.
It was clear to me that the steam engine model of the human psyche of Freud never had the slightest chance of being accurate. But even more modern models are just as absurd.

[This in itself gives a good reason for people to learn Physics and Math--so that by being exposed to real science they can tell what is pseudo science.]


[I ought to mention that the  pretense of being able to understand the human soul and to diagnose its ills and cure them is as old as medicine itself. And the people that were thought to know something about that were usually on the religious side of things. So the fact that they really knew nothing about what they pretended to know opened to way for modern pseudo scientists to pretend the same thing. Same pretense in new clothing

Rather the Torah comes to reveal objective moral values that are already "out there."

I wanted to defend my point of view a little so that it does not seem like I am just picking up pieces of conflicting philosophies. Even though I am not trying to build any kind of system, I still have a basic world view that I think needs defending.

[This is meant to be a continuation of previous blogs where I mentioned the philosophers that have influenced me.]

So in short:I think there are universals and universals are perceptible by reason. That is reason knows more that how to discern  contradictions. That is about the sum and size of it. Moral values are simply out there and reason applied to moral values perceives them just like reason applied to math perceives certain rules.

So that means that my concept of Torah is like Saadia Gaon and the חובות לבבות Obligations of the Heart that things are not moral because the Torah says so. Rather the Torah comes to reveal objective moral values that are already "out there."

Michael Huemer has a web site paper of how there is no such thing as pure empirical knowledge.You always bring some a priori into it. And I am grateful to Dr. Huemer for his clarity in stating these ideas more or less in the form I just gave them.
But this basic orientation of mine started when I was younger than now. Probably even before high school. But at least I recall I was doing a good amount of reading philosophy in high school.-and even had organized a little group with Wendy Wilson and Roland Hutchinson learning Chinese Philosophy. In any case, I was pretty convinced even back then that something was seriously horrific with Post Modern Philosophy [even though I did not know exactly what.] But I can see why I though to learn Torah in the Mir in NY rather than have anything to do with the terrible stupid philosophies of the twentieth century.


[If the Philosophy departments had been teaching Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, that would have made me more interested but in those days, the world of philosophy  was really full of pseudo intellectuals].


At any rate, you can see in my short three sentences  version of my philosophy that I take the back line of Plato Aristotle, Hegel, Leonard Nelson.--a world that Mind and Being are complementary.And also that reason perceives much more than contradictions in language. Outside of this, most 20th century philosophy I understood even when I was in high school is just lunacy expressed in fancy language.

Russia does not want a Ukrainian naval base in the Sea of Azov

My impression is that Russia does not want a Ukrainian naval base in the Sea of Azov and that Putin was thinking that the Ukrainian flotilla going into the Azov sea was a prelude towards making a base there.

It is kind of the same reason that Kennedy did not want Soviet atomic missiles in Cuba. But I think Russia is even more sensitive about guarding its perimeter--even more than the USA.

Russia thinks that Ukraine can be unpredictable because it has two different kinds of populations. One set is the actual ethic Russians or Russian leaning people that long for the values that made the West Great.The Peter the Great values.[And those people include lots of ethic Ukrainians, not just Russians]. The other set of Ukrainians are the low lives that steal at any and ever opportunity they can find and that population is just starting to show it murderous tendencies after the thawing out period after the USSR.So Russia knows these tendencies are real. It is really frightening to see what lays under the surface in Ukraine, once Russian rule is gone.


I am not sure how to explain another thing I saw in the Ukraine. Almost anything good there was built by the USSR. And the people that are nice and good were often those with Russian blood or at least highly leaning towards Russia.

Kant Friesian School

In terms of the Kant Friesian School of Thought of Kelley Ross, I do not see why there is made such a big difference between that school and Hegel.  Hegel is mainly about Metaphysics and the Friesian School is mainly about epistemology. These are two different areas. And Hegel never claimed to have any answer to the Mind Body problem. He simply is not concerned with it and thinks its is not related to the structure he is trying to build. Clearly he thinks there is no problem in the first place--like Thomas Reid already said.
So we have with Leonard Nelson an answer to the question. Why does that have to cancel out Hegel?

[A difference is supposedly about the dinge an sich[thing in itself]. To Hegel one gets to knowledge about the thing in itself through a dialectical process--it is not by just pure reason as McTaggart makes clear.[It is pure reason applied to Being] And in fact that is how we know stuff. We reason things out sometimes over eons and ages based on a back and forth dialog between what we see and measure and what we think is the reason for what we see.

It is not just by non intuitive immediate knowledge. That kind of knowledge does give a starting point however.



You might think this is not so important to you but  it is to me. I do not have an overwhelming interest in philosophy as a discipline but I do have a need to make sense of the world I live in. And I find a few philosophers that help me do that. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Kelley Ross. They certainly do not say the same thing, but each one for me adds one extra piece to the puzzle. [I also should add Rav Nahman and the Gra --but not as philosophers but more in the way of filling in the missing pieces. With Rav Nahman I learned the importance of שמירת הברית sexual purity, the tikun klali, learning fast and other things. From the Gra I learned trust in God and the importance learning Torah. From the חובות לבבות (Obligations of the Heart) I learned the importance of learning natural sciences. That however took some time to sink in until I saw the same thing in other rishonim (medieval authorities))] I do not assume any one person has everything right. I try to use common sense to put together a coherent world view.

I ought to mention that Gauss had a very positive thing to say about Fries and David Hilbert had a whole file devoted to documenting his efforts to help Leonard Nelson.