Creation ex nihilo, and the Rambam.

[I consider the Torah to be in the realm of the "dinge als sich alein" of Kant-the thing in itself. This means that reason can determine its existence, but the character and universal principles about the thing in itself are half from the object and half from the subject.--(I am going out of my way to distinguish this from the Neo Kant school.)]


 Creation ex nihilo. To say that God creates is to say that beings now exist that did not exist before. Finite beings are not made “out of God”. They are made, produced, created. There is nothing contradictory in saying that a Creator brings beings into being. He makes to exist what was non-existent without the act of creation!
Even the verse that some people use to defend Pantheism, "the whole world is full of his glory,"  still implies the world is not Him. There are areas where His Glory does not extend to וכבודי לאחר לא אתן "My Glory to another I will not give."


It seems basically clear that Torah does not hold of pantheism.  Even Reb Nachman was going with the Rambam on creation ex Nihilo as he says in at least one place in his major book. [I forget the exact place but it is easy to look up with the printed index at the end of it.]


The evil inclination begins at its lowest level in physical desires and goes upwards until it reaches it root in Satan.  the higher one goes in the service of God, that the kelipot [dark forces] get awoken every time one reaches a higher level. Putting these two idea together we can understand that as one gets higher in the service of God that the evil inclination that is awoken against him becomes more evil but less physical.

some quike thoughts about Kant

Some quike thoughts about Kant"
The story starts from Hume and the idea that reality need not be related to our beliefs about it. A realist wants beliefs to correspond to reality, and not reality to correspond to beliefs. Because of this Hume simply says there is no knowledge about things we don't experience. Logic can tell us nothing but what is included in the definition of things but nothing about reality. Kant disagrees with this. He says there can be synthetic a priori knowledge. The question he needs to answer is "how?"
{An example he gives that shows us that we do have synthetic a priori knowledge is Mathematics.}

Some suggestions on the ways we can have this knowledge. Kant: Structures already in the mind. [This is not as ridiculous as it sounds. Clearly a bathtub of computer chips is not the same thing as a computer. For computer chips to do anything, the structure has to be implanted.]\
Hegel holds reason can get to the dinge an sich


Kant is tripped up by the  basic question of how to get reason to perceive things outside the realm of experience. So he comes up with this category of the thing in itself. Reason perceives its existence but to understand its character is by structures in reason. My problem here is that the synthetic knowledge Kant is talking about is universals. The way I see it Reason perceives universals plenty well with no help of inherent structures. And this leads me to the Intuitionst (Michael Huemer, G.E. Moore, Prichard) approach to the problem of Kant. He expands the role of reason. Is this legitimate? By simply expanding the role powers of reason can Michael Huemer answer the problem of Hume? I am not so sure. Kant wants a justification -not just a blank statement. [It seems to me that Fichte hold from intellectual intuition.]


Furthermore, a very troubling thing about Kant. He expands the role of reason beyond Hume. That is nice, but then he limits it. He says it must not go into metaphysics. But he adds that it automatically does go into metaphysics. And when it does so it comes up with self contradictory beliefs. And the most troubling thing is that he is not talking about the human faculty of reason. He is talking about pure reason, Reason in its essence. And it is this reason in its very essence which by necessity falsifies information about the world (by the antimonies); How are we supposed to understand this?
Does not this seem strange?




 Hegel. He obviously does not impose any restrictions on reason at all. I can only say that I am a bit horrified that Jurgen Habermas is not horrified by Hegel and Marx. It is not just the collapse of Socialist totalitarian systems founded on the thought of Rousseau, Marx, and Hegel which bothers me. And it that I think there must be something in these systems that is wrong but not apparent to the human eye. They all sound great on paper. [Now two years later I retract. Hegel has two areas he is good at-- analyzing other philosophers and building up a metaphysical system. Th dumb part is his social theories and politics]
Looking at all this I can only say that I agree with Kant about the limits of reason. In my mind only a society founded on reason and the faith in the Torah can be just in any sense. I have heard enough horror stories about socialized medicine to chill anyone's blood. We definitely need a reasoned defense of the type of Liberal democracy of John Locke which is possible to defend only by Kant. Locke himself is not very good at defending liberal democracy because his system has no moral autonomy. Self interest is the motivating force, not moral justice. So a real decent defense of John Locke would have to start with Kant. But it could not end there. 

I have thought this way for years. I apologize to all readers that it took me so long to state this openly.

Nietzsche derived the existence of the subconscious from Leibniz and christened it the Id. This was later borrowed by Freud.

Nietzsche derived the existence of the subconscious from Leibniz and christened it the "Id." This was later borrowed by Freud (and is generally attributed to Freud). Nietzsche thought the Id is the source of true values. And he said openly "consciousness falsifies."
[It is true that Leibniz did originate this concept. He said that representation causes consciousness and not as people think that consciousness causes representation.]
Kant went further. He thought that Reason itself (i.e. the very essence of the faculty of reason ) falsifies. He got this from Hume. Hume based himself on one basic insight that he says over and over again and it is clear that all of his reasoning rests on the cornerstone of one basic principle. That reason itself can only perceive contradictions. But the way Hume said this is misleading for most people. Can you conceive or unicorns yes. Can you conceive of a square circle? No. This sounds like what Hume was talking about. But it is actually more profound. Does the contradiction of something imply a contradiction? This sounds like I can convince that 2+2=5 would not imply a contradiction. But this is not what Hume means. He uses the word imply the way it is used in logic today. Can you derive from the same fact two contradictory things? Then that is called implying a contradiction. This is an important difference. I can conceive of circular argument not implying any contradiction. But the way Hume means this is since I can derive two contradictory things from a circular argument it is therefore false.

This makes the fact that Kant based himself on Hume a lot more reasonable. Hume's point is a good point. The great philosophers today like Bryan Caplan and Michael Huemer definitely considered reason capable of conceiving a lot more stuff than contradictions. But this precisely the point of Kant. Kant definite expanded reason way beyond Hume.-He thought that reason itself can cross the border to see the existence of the thing in itself-but he said the character of the thing in itself depends on the observer. [Exactly like Quantum Mechanics.]

But Kant held that at a certain point Reason tries to go beyond its boundary into metaphysics. This is where I think that insanity comes from. Not consciousness like Nietzsche thought, but from Reason itself venturing where it does not belong.\

 Reason falsifies. But his approach was more along the lines that Reason coupled with another faculty he called Faith (or as philosophers call it  immediate non intuitive perception) does perceive the truth. Faith corrects Reason.

I realized after writing the above essay that it stops right where it ought to begin. So what is a young collage student to do? What does this say about the essence of life? What does it mean in terms of personal direction?

You need to find one basic moral value and stick with it at all cost. This has to be something of your own choosing. I can make recommendations but it has to be something that you believe in has the power to redeem you from evil and the sitra achra {the dark side}. But I believe that if you hold to even one basic simple moral value at all cost then you will be redeemed.

There are cults which are really bad -- even though they are founded on a saint or tzadik

There are cults which are really bad -- even though they are founded on a saint or tzadik. This is the reason I have not written an essay today.





[I want to mention in reference to my essay yesterday that I think the Torah [the set of the Five Books of Moses] is not porous. I know every Jewish group looks on the Torah as being able to absorb any world view the want to impose on it --in my view the Torah is not porous. Rather it  has a very specific world view ]



I consider the tzadikim of Chasidim to be in what is called the intermediate zone which is high above the trans-personal zone but still not the same thing as total enlightenment.
I consider the general chasidic movement however to be basically based on people that only reached the transpersonal zone.
I am a bit rushed but in plain English this means that following most chasidic cults leads one into the Dark Side.

The reason I as a philosopher am discussing these issues is that basically I hold from the Kant school of thought that Carl Jung was a part of.

The  areas in which i think that breslov is wrong and are are: Pantheism, so called Zniut and actually many other things
However i admit that I don't consider chasidut to be of the degree of  authority that breslov gives it.In this case i think every person should and must create his own world view based on the Torah and philosophy and science and Logic and reason and especially his or her own parents.

With the emphasis in breslov on  the cultic features that define any cult one would be almost tempted to say that chasidut is  not any different than any cult. [one feature is that ''so and so was the greatest such and such that every lived.'' When you encounter this philosophy in any group you are definitely dealing with a cult.]

The essential event that happens is one starts to think of himself as a god or as G-d or the true tzadik or many other variations of ego inflation.

(Morality  means: Never lying, and working honestly for a living, and not asking for handouts, and being married. The Ten Commandments.
 I consider morality and holiness to be closely connected. (That I got from Hegel).
  On the other hand Kabalah and/or Eastern religions tend (when they are effective in opening the gates to the beyond)  to be traps. What I am trying to say is the standard common sense morality and logic and reason seems to me to be the only valid standards of behavior and spirituality. Logic may not be very good, but it is the best thing out there. Common sense does not seem perfect, but it is the best among  all other options.

We must distinguish what we might call common sense morality. One ought not to tell lies, one ought to keep agreements, one ought not to attack others without provocation--these are all elements of common sense morality.


[I was at The Mir and then when I got to Israel I did get a kind of sense [immediate non-intuitive knowledge] for the spiritual realm. But I don't think this is exclusive. Also, I think that the basic reason that this path worked was for the basic moral values in the path
Torah contains two levels. A first level moral law and then a second level Divine Law. To see this in detail see the Rambam/(Maimonides). The first level is the law of the ancient Greeks, natural law. The next level is Mount Sinai.  The Rambam holds the first level also needed Revelation. People are in no way automatically moral. To get even to the level of natural law needed some kind of Divine input.
Then when people were ready for it came the second level of Mount Sinai. Now what I wanted to point out is the are plenty of aspects of the first level of natural law in the Torah. Because the Rambam and the Talmud make clear that the Laws of the Torah have reasons. And these reasons are not mysterious. They are knowable. and the Rambam [Maimonides] himself gives some of the reasons, some of which are straightforward natural law.]




Now I can get to my point after this introduction. The point is once one gets in connect with the spiritual realm the basic event that happens is the Dark Side shows up, and also ego inflation occurs. This is totally outside the basic effect of learning kabalistic literature which causes ego inflation even when one is not in contact with the spiritual realm.
The essential event that happens is one starts to think of himself as the Messiah or as G-d or the true tzadik or many other variations of ego inflation.

The fact of ego inflation does not take away the fact that one may have true insights into spiritual  and human nature. In this mixed realm,  great insight and miracles tend to be mixed with an overgrown ego and personality problems that get inflated because of the power of this realm. I have not seen or heard any safeguards against this. Every spiritual group that I have seen or heard of seems to have the same exact set of problems.

The problem is simple. Muslims are addicted to murder. It is just a bad habit that is hard to break.

 However I remember going to the Kotel (Western Wall) by bus, and every day there were some Arabs in the Gate of Shechem area that threw Molotov cocktails at the bus and rocks. But this was at a time when Eged [the bus company] had gotten smart and put unbreakable windows on the buses. But this was a daily incident. I highly doubt if any of the Arabs were even searched for by the police. The Israeli police in that area were in general Arabs or Druze themselves. This type of incident did not seem to bother them much. [That is to say I do not know if they were Druze or Arabs, because they seemed to be both. It seems to me that Israel sometimes put straightforward Arab police in the area and other times put Druze from the North. It seems to me clear that the Druze would have been  more eager to enforce the law and protect the buses. [In fact, even Arabs from the north of Israel probably would have been more eager to enforce the law. The Arabs from the North of Israel were in general peaceful decent citizens in  those days.] But that never happened. The attacks on the buses were daily over the several year period that I was going to the Kotel(Western Wall) every day.]  But besides this there were many attacks on me and others on a daily basis that never got into the news. I remember one professor at Hebrew University in Givat Ram [the Natural Sciences  campus] that was killed on one bus. This bothered me more than usual because I knew him. He was the professor that the Russian Physicist, George Ryzanov did his experiments in his lab to test his Unified Field Theory. So I had some dealings with him. [I no longer think his theory is right.]
Here is an important insight from the foremost philosopher of this generation:
"Historically, terrorism falls in a category different from crimes that concern a criminal court judge."
Jurgen Habermas
This is the problem in Israel The terrorism being practiced daily on Jews are not criminal offensives. The media thinks they can cover of the nature of the problem by the weasel word way of referring to "the conflict" in the Middle East. This is not a "conflict." It is war. And in war you can't go and question every person from the enemy side to see if he is actively attacking Jews today.  And even if you could find out, what can you do if tomorrow he decides to buy a non refundable ticket to Gan Eden by killing some Jews or Christians?

Can you imagine in World War I walked out of your trench across the battle field to the other side and reading Miranda rights to the soldiers on the other side?
The problem is simple. Muslims are addicted to murder. See the article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali:The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World. [http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/05/ayaan-hirsi-ali-the-global-war-on-christians-in-the-muslim-world.html] It really does not matter if it is Jews or Christians or other Muslims. It is simply an addiction that there is no cure for. It is like cigarettes addiction or drugs. At a certain point, the person just can't help himself anymore.

Is there a moral obligation to observe social norms?

Is there a moral obligation to observe social norms? I have a few questions that bother me about social norms. The questions that bother me about social norms are :  Are they natural law? Or are they legal positivism? They seem to be neither, but occupy some middle ground. These questions bother me  because I was born in America at a time in which the major goal and value was self reliance and individuality. Even though the hippies were attacking social norms,  but they just elevated these values beyond their usually accepted level. In Southern California to be independently minded was the  given prime value. No one debated this. [Unlike in the USSR where individualism was attacked.]
But as for what values one would come up with? Clearly Nietzsche was the big thing in those days and also Ann Rand. (She held from agent based values). [Marxism was the economic theory  the philosophy of the hippies.] So the American value of self reliance was swallowed by other value systems. To Nietzsche the Ubermensch creates his own values. To Marx, moral values are an invention of the ruling monied class to exploit the workers. It is a form of moral relativism like Nietzsche. Still the hippies were attacking authority and emphasized the need to be your own person.
Later when I leaned Talmud I discovered that it was very similar to Spinoza in that it holds from an objective moral system than does not depend on the observer.

  Talmud was very different than science because in science you could not start to do your own research until you finished and knew the subject. In Talmud each area stands by itself. So you can in theory open up one Tosphot and understand it without having to have gone through the whole Talmud. [Science is like a pyramid.]

  The Rambam (Maimonides) holds from two axioms that are prime values in his mind. One that there is no difference between the laws of the Torah and the Talmud. That seems simple enough. In general the law of  Talmud is  connected and supported by Biblical law. The Sages of the Talmud sure spend enough time and effort to defend this. However you can't see how successful they were without Tosphot.
The other thing that occupied the attention of Maimonides was to show that the system of law based on the Law  is  rigorous. He succeed in this. No one before or after him ever did.


  However like Von Mises' critique of communism,  any system of human beings that controls people from the top is doomed to failure. The first reason is the reason of Von Mises. Lack of information. While Maimonides showed the logical rigor of the Law,  if you look in any one area, the basic questions of application come fast and heavy until you realize that  in spite of how simple it looks you really don't know the law. The other thing is concept of an all knowing judge (of Ronald Dworkin). Even if he know all the details of the law and all the details of everyone's life--it is still a system being administered from the top to the bottom. There is still no self reliance or independence.

  What is bothering me is social norms. These are clearly very important to people trying to create a super-organism. But do they have any moral value?



Three things bother me. First that the social norms  are considered authoritative, not the Talmud or Rambam, nor Shulchan Aruch. Mere social norms are elevated to Divine status. This bothers me because it was not how I understood the Talmud. The whole idea of the Talmud was that God gave men laws to keep. These laws are objective. They do not depend on what people think of them. This is certainly how Maimonides understood the Talmud.  If not for this, the leaders at the desert of  Sinai could simply have decided that worshiping the Golden calf was perfectly permitted, and you go by a majority vote.

  Social norms gained status after the Middle Ages. Very little of what came after the Middle Ages impresses me except for Mathematics and  the  natural sciences. Even getting rid of kings bothers me. (Large portions of the populace vote themselves money and various carve-outs out of the public coffers. These groups vote monolithically as ethnic blocs to do achieve these takings.Who needs dumb voters?)

  This lead me to the third thing that bothers me more than any of the above. The difference between esoteric doctrine and exoteric doctrine. Once a community is stating public doctrines that are meant to entice people to join the movement, but holding from esoteric doctrines  in which the real norms of behavior are different and often directly opposed to the exoteric doctrines--then I define this community as an cult with all of the negative connotations that go along with that noun. What bothers me is the rationalization of crime when the criminals  in authority and the use of social norms to justify this.

  As for me, I think Reason can know objective moral values . Moral values are based on Nature,-not the will of men. This can also be called Divine Law. The Torah is to tell us what we ought to be able to perceive on out own if not for the evil inclination. This is my own approach to moral issues based large on the Torah and the medieval thought of Maimonides.
 
  This approach is somewhere in between the Kant approach that reason can perceive ''the thing in itself'' though he does not say how, and the intuitionists like H.A. Prichard  and say that reason perceives universals, and morals are universals applied to human affairs. {In this way the intuitionists are like Hegel.} [This is directly opposed to the so called neo-Kant school which is not like Kant at all. To Kant the existence of the ''thing in itself'' does not depend on the perception of the subject.]