Achilles and the Tortoise, on Self Evidence 8th Revision with Footnotes pdf
ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE 7th Revision
An Essay on the Logical Foundations of Torah Study;
SELF EVIDENCE, INTUITION, AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
by Gerald Parkoff
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בס “ד
7th Revision
טו סיון תשע”ב
June 5, 2012
Who has the Truth? And who represents Am Yisroel, the nation of Israel? How can we reassert the authority of Torah in a world where only opinions take main stage?
Rabbi Yosef Epstein ztz’l writes in his Hakdama to Mitzvot HaBayit (p. 21):
“If the Torah would not have been given, Man would have discovered the Parsha on Proper Conduct himself, through his own intellect. The Avot learned Torah from their own internal mental processes. They recognized obligations by themselves. From their great wisdom they came to the basic principles of the Torah.” Rabbi Epstein here quotes a Tshuva of the Rashba, (I:94): “There are no parts of the mitzvot which do not hint at the elements of wisdom, because it is wisdom which creates the obligation to behave properly. It follows that wisdom obligates proper action and proper refraining from action. Proper action and proper refraining from action in turn informs us as to what is hinted at by wisdom. The Avot through their great wisdom came to the basic principles of action and restriction. Chazal said that Avraham, gained wisdom from his two kidneys, meaning from some internal process of understanding and intuition. and so for all of the Avot.”
Rabbi Epstein continues to tell us that the Avot learned from themselves the way of living and proper behavior. Their way of life becomes a pattern and model for their children and descendants, to go in their footsteps and to learn from them for generations to come.
This seems to be in agreement with a statement by Cicero, the Roman Jurist and Philosopher, concerning the operation of Natural Law:
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commandments, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions…We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it…on eternal unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times.
(Cicero, De Re Publica, III, 22:33. )
But if the judgments of men were in agreement with Nature…then Justice would be equally observed by all. For those creatures who have received the gift of reason from Nature have also received right reason, and therefore they have also received the gift of Law, which is right reason applied to command and prohibition.
(Cicero, De Legibus, I, 12:33)
Natural Law according to Cicero is discovering the self-evident truths of the moral law through intuitive understanding. “We need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it.” It is a gift from nature and must somehow be in accord with nature.
Hence the term “natural law.”
The Rambam echoes this idea of intuition and the ability of the individual to recognize what is right:
“A matter which the intellect almost compels one to accept is that we do not destroy one life for another.” (Hilchot Yesodai Torah 5:7).
“Man is singular in the creation of the species in that from within himself, and from his own thoughts, he knows good and evil and can do whatever he wants. No one can stop him from doing good or evil. “ (Hilchot Tshuva, 5:1)
THE RAMBAM ON AUTHORITY VERSUS REASON
But in a startling turnaround to this idea of intuition and internal knowledge, of the compulsion of Reason, the Rambam says something very different in Hilchot Melachim (8:11), where he writes:
Any man (i.e., any gentile) who accepts the seven commandments and is meticulous in observing them is thereby one of the righteous of the nations of the world, and he has a portion in the word to come. This is only the case if he accepts them and observes them because G-d commanded them in the Torah, and taught us through our teacher, Moses, that the children of Noah had been commanded to observe them even before the Torah was given. But if he observes them because of his own conclusions based on reason, then he is not a resident-alien and is not one of the righteous of the nations of the world, nor is he one of their wise men.
(Rambam, Hilchot Melachim 8:11)
The Rambam and the Rabbinical sources upon which he relies upon emphasizes that one must accept the Mitzvot not because Reason or Intuition led one to accept them, not because they appealed to an individual’s sense of justice and fairness, but only because they were commanded to us by Moses, our Teacher, who in turn learned them from HaKodosh Boruch Hu.
Again, if a gentile accepts the Seven Mitzvot because they were commanded by G-d, he is Mai Chassidei Umot Olam, one of the righteous of the nations of the world. If not, he is not even one of their wise men. This is a striking position for the Rambam, famed to be one of the great rationalists and philosophers of all time. How is it that Reason here is abrogated and made secondary to acceptance of authority, in this case the acceptance of the system of the Torah?
This is the total opposite of Cicero’s concept of Natural Law. Cicero argues that we discover the self-evident truths of the moral law through intuitive understanding. “We need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it.” It is a gift from nature and must somehow be in accord with nature. Hence the term “natural law.” On this Marvin Fox writes:
This conception of a law of nature that dictates principles of justice and morality, a law deriving from reason and in accord with nature, which is universal, eternal, and unchanging, exercised enormous influence on Christian thought. Yet though the main centers of Jewish learning were in contact with Hellenistic philosophy and Roman thought, Judaism, unlike Christianity, never made such a theory of natural law a prominent feature of its teachings.
In the Hebrew bible men are thought of as a subject to direct and specific divine commandments . It is through G-d’s revelation, mediated by the prophets, that men are taught to know what is right and wrong. Moreover, the vast majority of the biblical commandments are addressed specifically to the Jews. In established rabbinic teaching, only the smallest part of biblical legislation is universal law, intended for all human beings. All the rest, the hundreds of other injunctions and prohibitions, bind only the Children of Israel. Nothing in the Hebrew Bible even approximates the Ciceronian idea of a natural law, which is addressed to all men by way of reason, and which prescribes right modes of human behavior.
In principle, there could not be such a conception in the Hebrew Bible, sincere there is no idea of nature, nor even a word for nature in that book. The Hebrew word tev’a, when it is understood to mean “nature,” does not occur in the Bible or in the Mishnah. It makes its first appearance in medieval Hebrew usage, particularly in the words of the philosophers. The idea of nature arises only with philosophical reflection. As Leo Strauss rightly points out, “the discovery of nature is the work of philosophy. Where there is no philosophy, there is no knowledge of natural right as such. The Old Testament…does not know “nature”…There is, then no knowledge of natural right as such in the Old Testament.” (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp 81-82). Aristotle taught us to think of nature as that which is endowed with its own internal principle of motion,. The natural world is thus self-developing and self-explanatory. In the Hebrew Bible the world and man are seen as created by G-d, sustained by Him and subject to His will, and this alone makes them intelligible. Biblical man has full powers of reason, but unlike Cicero the Bible does not teach that once man has reason he also has knowledge of the moral law. In ancient Hebrew thought there is only one source of the knowledge of good and evil – the commandments of G-d as they are revealed to man.
(Marvin Fox: Interpreting Maimonides, Univ of Chicago Press, 1990, p 125.)
Again referring back to the Rambam’s famous passage in Hilchot Melachim:
“Any man (i.e., any gentile) who accepts the seven commandments and is meticulous in observing them is thereby one of the righteous of the nations of the world, and he has a portion in the word to come. This is only the case if he accepts them and observes them because G-d commanded them in the Torah, and taught us through our teacher, Moses, that the children of Noah had been commanded to observe them even before the Torah was given. But if he observes them because of his own conclusions based on reason, then is not a resident-alien and is not one of the righteous of the nations of the world, nor is he one of their wise men.”
(Rambam, Hilchot Melachim 8:11 (see end note #1)
Marvin Fox continues:
There are two points here of striking importance. First is the fact that for post-Sinaitic times, Maimonides explicitly makes the salvific force of the observance of the Noahite commandments dependent on a belief in their divine origin as commandments known only by way of G-d’s revelation through Moses in the Torah. However, even the pre-Sinaitic generations are considered to have been directly commanded by G-d, through Adam and Noach, to observe these precepts. Of particular interest is that Maimonides deliberately excludes the validity of any claim that these laws are known through reason or that they bind us because of purely rational considerations. One might have thought that it would be meritorious for a man to have achieved a basic knowledge of the rules of morality by way of rational reflection. But Maimonides denies to such a man all claims to special merit, and in the process, denies that there is or can be any natural moral law of the kind that Cicero had set forth .
The full force of this denial is evident in the second point that requires our special attention, namely, the final phrase in the quoted passage,” nor is he one of their wise men.” Maimonides is here excluding a man who claims rational moral knowledge, not only from the circle of the pious and righteous who win salvation, but also from the circle of the wise. (Much has been written about this last phrase …to show that this is a faulty reading and that the correct reading should be, “but he is one of their wise men.”)
It is my view that a correct understanding of Maimonides will show why he could not affirm a theory of natural law, why he denied salvation to those who believed that they could have moral knowledge on purely rational grounds, and why he considered the latter neither pious nor wise. With respect to the last question, I shall not presume in any way to try to settle the problem of the correct reading of our text. I shall only give evidence that it would have been perfectly consistent with Maimonides’ views, even necessary, for him to have denied that those who hold a doctrine of natural law are wise men, that is to say, good philosophers.
From his earliest work on the great book of his advanced years, The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides consistently denied that moral rules are based on principles of reason or that they are capable of demonstration. Already in his Treatise on Logic, written in his youth, he treats moral rules as not falling under the categories of truth and falsehood at all, so that it is simply a logical error to speak of moral rules as true or false. Instead, he thinks of moral behaviour as having to do with the beautiful and the ugly, and these are matters either of subjective taste or, as is usually the case, of established social convention. In short, Maimonides holds that moral claims are never open to rational argument or demonstration. They are “propositions which are known and require no proof for their truth.” Unlike other such propositions that are indemonstrable but are certainly true, such as statements about immediate perceptions and the first principles of mathematics, moral rules are true only in the sense that in a well-ordered society they are generally accepted and not subject to doubt. They are “conventions, as when we know that uncovering the privy parts is ugly, or that compensating a benefactor generously is beautiful.”(Maimonides’ Treatise on Logic, Israel Efros, ed, p. 47). [Marvin Fox, pp. 132-133]
“Maimonides holds that moral claims are never open to rational argument or demonstration” according to Marvin Fox. Therefore intuition and self-evidence are rejected as unreliable means for ascertaining truth and certainty in the area of morals and ethics. The Rambam’s position (within his framework of being a rationalist par-excellence) can be explained in contemporary terms on the basis of a logical rule which states that you can not derive an “ought” from an “is”. You cannot derive a statement of obligation from a statement of fact. This is a simple logical observation. The implication is that in order to have a system of obligation, you need axioms of obligations which will not be dependent upon any prior or more basic set of obligations – else we go backward ad infinitum. So where does anyone begin from? The Tiffereth Yisroel (commentary on the Mishneh) points out that this was the great strength of the Jewish People. We received a complete system of Axioms and Rules at Sinai and in the forty year period in the desert. The nations of the world are still groping for a system of judgment and law which will be agreed upon and accepted by all.
The apparent contradiction or conflict in the Rambam between Sevara (Reason) and Authority can possibly be explained as follows: when it came to accepting the system of Torah, his allegiance was unbending and complete, without qualifications or justifications, as can be shown in many places in his writings. When it came to individual parts of the system, then the Rambam as did all of Chazal, recognized the importance and central place of Reason or Sevara.
In an Age of Reason and Enlightenment, the acceptance of a system on the basis of authority is very unpopular. But we must accept some system of values and commitments. If not, then we have become Anarchists where there is no system but a self-invented and do what you like type of environment. The question then still remains, which system do we adopt?
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