w72 A major

Language is subjective. That is the sounds emanating from my mouth to your ears have zero intrinsic meaning except for how I understand them and how you understand them. There is nothing that is independent of the speaker and the listener.
Reality on the other hand is objective. For example the ocean is blue. That fact has nothing to do with how anyone observes the ocean. It is just the fact that it absorbs all frequencies of light except blue.
So language tells you nothing about reality.

So when Wittgenstein said after reading his Tractatus no one could be the same he was quite right. People began to think that language defines reality. They fell into that trap.

B Minor w71  w71 midi  w71 nwc

w70 A Flat Major  w70 midi w70 nwc

What is education?

 STEM and Survival Skills, The Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. [Without that it is hard to know how to learn. I mean that knowing "how to learn" is a skill which needs to be acquired by just like playing the violin.
So even with study of the two Talmuds, people usually have no idea of the depths without something like the Avi Ezri or the hidushim of Rav Haim of Brisk]


However moral education is imparted by example. Not by books.

[Rishonim  held one ought also to learn Metaphysics.  When the Rambam says so openly in the Guide he says specifically he is referring to the Metaphysics of the ancient Greeks. So that is clear. Plato and Aristotle. But when the Obligations of the Hearts also brings this same idea on the first page of his book, he is referring to that study as learned and understood by the Muslims. So what does that mean? So that has to refer to later commentaries on Aristotle.
So at least to these Rishonim, some philosophy is important. Others held the exact opposite. Yet as philosophy developed I feel Kant and Hegel are important. But I can see the problems in philosophy also. But I found Dr Kelley Ross [based on Fries and Leonard Nelson] and his approach to be a great defense of faith. More than Hegel. Hegel has some areas where he is great. But he does not really recognize the existence of a kind of non intuitive immediate knowledge--faith.]

I think punishment is personal. While certainly the point about whole peoples and nations getting punished seem valid to some degree, however my feeling is that nothing happens to any individual that comes without there being a specific judgment. That is even if you see it happening to a whole people- nothing happens to me that has to do with others being punished. It always is about Me. Some evil deed I did, or some good deed I neglected.

You certainly see this in the Gates of Repentance which brings it from the Gemara Shabat "אין יסוריים בלי עוון" There are no trouble without sin.

[That is a debate in the Gemara. The Gemara concludes that death can come without sin but troubles always have some sin that is their cause. You can see this in Deuteronomy also אל אמונה ואין עוול צדיק וישר הוא God is a just God--with no perversion of judgement. He is righteous and straight.

The debate between Kant and Hegel

To me the issue in philosophy is still the debate between Kant and Hegel. But the issue seems to boil down to the differences between McTaggart and Leonard Nelson.
Besides that I just do not see that much or any of twentieth century philosophy has any worth or merit. Not the British American Analytic, nor the Continental versions.
Not that McTaggart was perfect when it comes to understanding Hegel. There were blind spots. See Cunningham on Hegel. Leo Nelson is clearly not straight with Kant, but seems to be about the best understanding of his system with proper modifications. See the blog of Dr Kelley Ross for information abut that.


Why I bring this up is that Dr. Kelley Ross shows how Kant fit in well with Quantum Mechanics. [He has an essay on a Kantian approach to QM based on Fries and Leonard Nelson.] But what I am wondering is would not Hegel also work? After all with Hegel the whole point of the dialectic is not just how knowledge proceeds. It is in the very fabric of reality itself. So this duality between the particles or wave seem to be exactly what Hegel was talking about. Each is some aspect of  a deeper reality just like Hegel always says about opposites- that you get to a higher level and the apparent contradiction disappears of becomes sublimated in the higher level. That is kind of what happens with Quantum Field Theory and String Theory. 






So when people start realizing how dumb 20th century philosophy, then was Kant and Hegel will start to matter more. And then so will the debate between Leonard Nelson and Herman Cohen and the Marburg school and McTaggart. [But I think the Marburg School is obsolete. The only approach to Kant that makes sense to me is Leonard Nelson and Kelley Ross.]

The silliness of 20th century philosophy was noted by Allan Bloom, Robert Hanna, Kelley Ross, and Steven Dutch.

Russian Revolution and justified anger. But the anger needs to be directed towards legitimate targets.

I wanted to bring a few ideas and then to tie them in.
[1] One is that to some degree I can see the point of the Russian Revolution. People feel hurt.  And sometimes that is justified. So from one aspect I can that there is such a thing as justified anger.

You can see this in the אורחות צדיקים [Paths of the Righteous] in the Gate of Anger.

The problem is that often the anger is directed towards the wrong targets. Capitalists, kulaks etc. Though it must have been that in tzarist Russia these powerful kulaks and capitalists were abusing people to the degree that their anger spilled over.

But also people were angry at religion. And that is also often justified. Not that in the Law of Moses, there is anything wrong. Not the Oral or Written Law. However people use that as a cover to hide their evil. This Rav Nahman pointed out often. So what people did was to reject all religion.

That was because people did not have the ability to be able to discern what is right and what is wrong. So they just said all religion is wrong. They did not have the insight and understanding of the Gra and Rav Shach to be able to tell the difference between the holy  and the Sitra Achra [the Dark Side.]
What they could have done was to have "faith in the wise" and just trust that the Gra and Rav Shach knew what they were talking about.

But furthermore, sometimes there is a point to the secular. It is not to say that if if just have the right religious values everything is OK. Not really. Often religion opens the door towards other things. People might start out with faith in a true tzadik like Rav Nahman but then get side tracked. That is in fact almost guaranteed. That is because it is in the very nature of things, that religion gets side tracked
all too quickly and easily.