I noticed the idea of divorce has come up. I wanted to mention to women that feel they can not get out of marriages that seem to be too problematic to them. The cure to this situation is to cure the fact that they never just want out of marriage. They want out of the marriage along with all the children and all husband's assets, and make him work for them.

Even if this does not apply to any particular wife, still the approach is so widespread that many men feel the only thing left to them is to refuse the divorce. [Which they can do by law. A forced divorce is not valid.]

Leonard Nelson

History has a way of by passing some philosophers which are only discovered long after they are gone. Leonard Nelson [influenced by Kant and Fries] has just begun to be noticed. [Except Kelley Ross was trying for  along time to bring his teachings to the public on his web site on the Friesian School].

One reason is I think that he was in bitter conflict with the Neo Kant school in Marburg.
There are probably other reasons like the fact that WWI made philosophy based in Germany unpopular--to say the least. WWII did nothing to add to the popularity of German philosophy.

I wanted to mention that though he was based to some degree on Fries, he corrected some mistakes in that approach. [Though I forgot what they were off hand.] 


[However I have to add that that I think that Leonard Nelson and Hegel are simply addressing different issues.  After all both hold we have access to the "thing in itself" and Hegel is  building a kind of Metaphysics that is built on Reason. It is not as incompatible with Nelson.]

path of balance

I am mainly looking for the path of balance and being a "mensch" a decent human being that was the path of my parents. So the way I think of this is שואף לאמצע [desire the middle] like you say in calculus that epsilon is שואף לאפס [epsilon goes to zero. But in Hebrew you say "epsilon desires to go to zero"].

However I realize that there are times one needs to concentrate on one thing alone. But while doing so I think it is important not to lose the big picture.

But one thing I think is is good to be a fanatic about. To be fanatic about being balanced and having good traits [Midot tovot] as you see well defined in books of Musar [Mediaeval books of ethics and also later the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter.

w55    w55 in midi format    w55 in nwc format [in which it was written].

Megilah of Esther

The Megilah of Esther has a comment at the very end. That I have found hard to understand for a long time and still have a hard time understanding. "All the rest of the acts of Achashverosh are written in the annals of the kings of Media and Persia".
The name Achashverosh is the way you pronounce "Xerxes" in Farsi. So we are talking about the same person  whose army of about a  million or more soldiers that was almost defeated by three hundred Spartans if not that someone betrayed them by finding a path that came up from their rear. Will you find that in the chronicles of the kings of Persia? It seems unlikely.

The Megilah ends before that misadventure, but from the Megilah itself it sounds like everything was peachy. 

Trinity seems to have many difficulties among Christians.

The Trinity seems to have many difficulties among Christians. Many see that it has logical difficulties

In Plato there is an idea of the One Emanating the lower worlds. So you could have souls that flow from God's light but are not God. But also are not exactly separate from Him either. [That is they would not be said to have been created but having flowed from God's infinite light.] In that sense, the Trinity can make sense. You say Jesus in one with God in the sense that his soul flowed from God with no division in between.

[What some do instead of this option is a kind of Kantian approach that Kierkegaard took. It was Christians were saying all the time anyway. "It is a mystery". Few took Hegel's approach. Which is somewhat like the Reshash [Sar Shalom Sharabi].

USA Constitution does not seem to have some deep philosophical analysis behind it.

Politics is odd. On one hand I can see the system of the USA [the USA Constitution] as making sense. But the thing that is puzzling about it is that it does not seem to have come about by any kind of logical analysis. [Though I used to think that John Locke had a lot to do with it, but that no longer seems to be the case.] Rather it is a basic development of English Law. Mainly the Magna Carta and the issues that came up in England with James II. [The Glorious Revolution]. The way it looks to me is that the English simply saw the problems with pure Parliamentary power, not some super intuition about the value of King and Parliament. Same with the house of Lords and Commons. It does not seem to have some deep philosophical analysis behind it.
 To me it might make sense to understand why the USA Constitution has worked so well until now, and why things seem to be going haywire.

To see how the English System developed, you need to learn about Edward I, the struggles of the later kings, [John I, Henry II][See the provisions of Oxford.], not the slightest bit of philosophic analysis. Zilch. Then you want to get to the American Constitution, you simply transplant the English System onto American soil, then change a few minor details.  

Yet the result is the most astounding system and balance or freedom with responsibility that the world has ever seen. Compare that with the logical rigorous analysis of Das Capital which results in gulags and mass starvation. You can not help and see that fundamental law of Physics: no matter how logical and rigorous a system is, if it does not agree with experiment, then t is wrong.