There is a future looking point of view in which one learns from past great people but does not assume that they got everything right. You need some way of combining the good that you learn from past great people and also gain some kind of sense of "birur" to take the wheat from the chaff. Or even to tell who really is a good person worthy to learn from.

But even if you find great people in the past and you can combine all their good ideas that still does not take care of the job of the present of looking into the future. Being future oriented.

I have so many thoughts in this direction it is hard to be able to put it all down-.

One side issue is this very process of "Birur"(choosing). This whole idea here is certainly related to Hegel except in a slightly different way. With Hegel you have thesis anti thesis and then synthesis. But Birur is not the same since choosing is simply deciding what is good and valid in the first place and rejecting the rest.

The idea of trust in God I would like to extend to learning. At least that is how I understood the concept for myself during a period of years when I was adhering to the way of learning of "Girsa" [saying the words and going on].
I had noted before that that the idea of  "Bitachon" [trust in God] extends to even the next world. That is openly mentioned in the most famous of all Musar books, The Obligations of the Heart חובות הלבבות.

So I would think to apply this to learning Physics also.

But I can imagine this is  a a bit of a stretch. First to accept the idea that learning Physics and Math is in the category of learning Torah. [I have mentioned this before.] [And to accept that learning Torah itself is a commandment]. Then to say that learning even without understanding is also in that category. And then also apply learning something that at first seems hard to understand.

Even so, this is what I would like to suggest.


[Later the next day I noted in the writings of Rav Nahman this very idea [in LeM vol I chapter 76]. There is such a thing as trust in God in such a way that one merits to understand his learning even without "iyun" deep study. But the actual idea of just saying the words and going on is also mentioned in the begining of the LeM על ידי עמצאות הדיבור זוכים להבנת התורה לעומקה 

g major w36mp3 w36 midi   w36 nwc [the score you can see in midi or nwc.]
w37  [w37 midi file]  w37 nwc

The importance of the Gra

The importance of the Gra is hard to overestimate since he seems to have had an amazing intuition about what is straight Torah. So the Litvak yeshiva movement founded on his principles in fact represents authentic Torah to a high degree. It seems to me that after the Gra has come into the world then in order to get to authentic Torah in any sense at all, one needs to go through the path of the Gra.
Mainly the path of the Gra in a practical sense means trust in God, and an emphasis on the idea of "bitul Torah". "Bitul Torah" means wasting time from learning Torah. The idea is that there are things that one ought to do besides learning Torah. However the thing to do when one is not obligated in those things is to learn Torah. [The actual path of the Gra got combined with Musar of Rav Israel Salanter and Rav Shach.]

The only thing that I have to add to this idea is that I believe along the lines of the rishonim [medieval authorities] that held Physics and Math to be in the category of Torah. [Even  though this is an argument among the rishonim]. [These same "Rishonim" Ibn Pakuda, Binyamin the Doctor, etc all held also metaphysics is in that same command of learning Torah. But I have a hard time identifying what exactly does that include. Clearly Aristotle. But what else?

[I would venture to say that the fact that most rishonim do not mention Aristotle in terms of Metaphysics that they must have been referring to the whole disciple as it existed then. That would mean the actual book of Aristotle The Metaphysics along with the commentaries of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Clearly also Plato and Plotinus. What I would add today would be the three Critiques of Kant and Hegel. Anything after that I am not sure of nor of the people leading up to Kant. That is to say a lot of people were leading up to Kant and all have value. But after Kant their value seems diminished to me. Also Kant and Hegel were the giants so after them I am not really sure of who would be thought to be progress after them? I would guess Leonard Nelson and Prichard. [Prichard was part of the school of  Intuitionists that Dr Huemer is based on.] (There is a great deal of tension between the Hegel approach and Leonard Nelson. I wish I had some kind of resolution for this matter and it seems of great importance to me and in fact to the whole world. But I have no resolution.Both Hegel and Nelson have significantly important points.]

At least Physics is well defined. We know where it is at today and therefore we know what to learn. String Theory.

w35 G Major. Winds, Brass, Violin.   [w35 in midi format]  w35 in nwc format

Howard Bloom mentioned that people are tribal [--in a super-organism] in The Lucifer Principle about what he calls a "social meme". He has got a very nice exposition how people get a certain kind of wiring in their heads that does not get easily readjusted once it is set--like a circuit board.

There are honest stupid people and deceitful stupid people.

The worst type of stupidity for me is not having any appreciation for what you don’t know. There are honest stupid people and deceitful stupid people. The honest variety can appreciate there is a lot they don’t know and could never understand. The deceitful variety portray what they don’t know as not that important and amenable to anyone’s understanding in principle. The deceitful variety are often the “educated” humanities folks and those in the soft sciences.

I prefer an uneducated stupid person to an educated one as a rule because the uneducated ones weren’t propagandized to believe they were smart as part of some soft university degree program. The educated ones are insufferable in large measure.

https://motls.blogspot.com/2020/02/when-dumb-humanities-trainees-deform.html#disqus_thread