Pinocchio gave his life to save his father. And he did in fact lose his life. But what kind of life was that? of a puppet? It was in fact his supreme sacrifice to save his Dad that became the cause that he became a real boy and in fact started having a true life, not the life of a puppet.
Why does this matter? because often art precedes philosophy in insight and depth.
The major thing I dislike about communism is that it makes no sense. [It is based on the Labor Theory of Value which is false. The value things have does not depend on how much labor went into making them. I do not are if someone spent a whole day making one needle. That makes it no more valuable to me than if a factory produced it and I can buy it for one cent. Rather, the value depends on how much people want it. And the factory owner does not extract excess value from the worker. He creates value. The proof you can see yourself. Try to make on your own something and then try to sell it on the street. One day of doing that would have shown Marx and Lenin a thing or two about capitalism.] But that is besides the fact of its supposedly scientific predictions came out just the opposite of what it was predicting. But when things are in chaos, it does provide a means to taking control. That was the assessment of the head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover. And he meant that in a negative sense. But the same idea was expressed to me by a Mormon who worked as an economist. [I asked him about President Hoover and the depression and the fact that Roosevelt instituted lots of socialist policies to bring the USA out of the Depression. Whether that worked I do not know, but the answer that Mormon fellow told me was that sometimes in a times of chaos, you need some way that central government can take control.] And in a more startling way it was expressed by many people I met in the Ukraine. No one ever told me things were better under democracy than under communism. Whenever I asked, people always told me things were better than than they were under democracy. [They always said: "It was better then than now." And I saw that also. The police were spending their time hiding in their station, and the streets were empty of police. The more the fear of the KGB dissipated, the more crime and chaos.] You could see this clearly. The more distance the memory of communism was, the more crime was taking over.
Still the point seems to be the same. To establish some kind of stability when everything is in chaos. But the order ought to be to first bring stability and then an free market democracy. Not the opposite.
It is an odd thing that you see in the Kant-Fries-Nelson school of thought that there is no cause and effect relation between subject and object (as Dr Kelley Ross makes clear in his blog site https://www.friesian.com/).
And in fact when I was looking at Physics I noticed that Newtons laws are expressed by the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian in such a way that objects simply tend towards the lowest energy state [or in optics towards the highest energy state] [So one might be excused to wonder how to they know where the lowest energy state is? Are particles that smart?]The causes of things seem to be the actual laws of nature, not the physical forces. It is almost as if we live in a Platonic world where the really real are the laws of mathematics. The physical world is a shadow representation of the really real.
One advantage of the Kant Fries school for me is after one has worked out all the kinks which was done by Greta Hermann and Kelley Ross, it proved me a sort of template to understand my own experience. For seven years in Tzefat [Safed] I had what in various schools of thought is categorized as "devekut", the "Infinite Light", Samadhi etc. [Though I can not tell which is more to the point.] This is not religious fanaticism but rather a direct experience of the Divine. Or sometimes even more--a direct connection with the Divine.-and absorption into the Infinite Light. But what you see in Kelley Ross is that this is just one area of value. Not all. In terms of the Ari one would say this is the area of value of "Keter" but lacks a;; the other areas. Thus one might have total devekut with God but lack any of the other areas of value. And even more so--each area of value is opposite to its exact opposite. So if one is connected with this highest area of value--when he falls he falls into its exact opposite the peak of evil
The general approach of the Mir Yeshiva in NY when it came to life's questions was "learn Torah". [In pain English that means the oral and written Law: the Old Testament, the two Talmuds plus the midrashim.] That was at least the basic idea I got by hanging around the rosh yeshiva, Rav Shmuel Berenbaum. That is there was an implicit awareness that life has tons of difficulties and most of which simply have no "solution". That is just the way life is. As Jordan Peterson puts it: "Life is hard." [He means that it is implicitly hard, not because someone else is making it hard.]
So while there is no promises, still the idea was the only way to deal with life's difficulties is to learn Torah.
[There are differences in approach however. How much in depth learning and how much fast leaning and the proper balance seems to differ from Litvak yeshiva to any other Litvak yeshiva.]
The only two things I would like to add to this is the idea of Physics and Mathematics being part of the command to learn Torah as you can see in the last of the first four chapters of Mishna Torah where "Pardes" is defined as Physics and Metaphysics as the Greeks understood them, and then later where it is stated that one should divide the learning time into Tenach, Oral Law, and Gemara and in the category of Gemara is ''Pardes."
Plus the idea that even Math can be learned in that fast sort of way that is usually reserved for learning Gemara fast- that is to say the words and go on.
The point of Rav Nahman of Breslov and the point of those learning his books is to address crises [plural] in an individual's life. It is not to define Torah. Nor is it actually to "be mehazek" strengthen one in keeping Torah-- though sometimes that is the effect. The cause of this is that something changed in human mentality in the 1700's. The old forms of community were still in place, but something about the modern mind changed. The issues and problems became very different.
This is very different from the sort of Musar (Ethics) books of the Middle Ages which were to define what it is that Torah requires from you in terms of Fear of God and character traits. They in essence explain what the Torah is all about in a practical sense. They are slightly different from books of the Middle Ages which deal more directly with the actual worldview of Torah.
What were some of the crises that Rav Nahman was dealing with? The average layman could accept the idea that we ought to just learn and keep Torah plainly and simply. But the problem was with religious leaders that seemed intent on fouling up the whole thing--and still are. So he deals with that often in e.g. LeM vol. I ch.s 8, 12, 28, 60, vol. II ch.s 1, 8 and many other places I forget off hand.