Faith vs. Knowledge vs. Truth

From the Introduction of Lev Shestov's Athens and Jerusalem comes relevant thinking to current political activities in Yesha:-

The task which I have set for myself in this book, Athens and Jerusalem, consists in putting to proof the pretensions to the possession of truth which human reason or speculative philosophy make. Knowledge is not here recognized as the supreme goal of man. Knowledge does not justify being; on the contrary, it is from being that it must obtain its justification. Man wishes to think in the categories in which he lives, and not to live in the categories in which he has become accustomed to think: the tree of knowledge no longer chokes the tree of life.

In the first part…I try to show that, in pursuing knowledge, the great philosophers lost the most precious of the Creator's gifts - freedom;...The second part, the most difficult,…reveals the indestructible bond between knowledge, as philosophy understands it, and the horrors of human existence;…In the third part,… the fruitless efforts of the Middle Ages to reconcile the revealed truth of the Bible with the Hellenistic truth are dealt with. The fourth part…begins by assuming that the truths of reason perhaps constrain us but are far from always persuading us and that, consequently,…[what] flows from them not only do not find their solution in the intelligere but, when they attain a certain tension, enter into a struggle against the intelligere - a terrible, desperate struggle - and sometimes overthrow and destroy it. Philosophy is not a curious looking around, not Besinnung, but a great struggle.

A similar purpose underlies all four parts of the book: to throw off the power of the soulless and entirely indifferent truths into which the fruits of the tree of knowledge have been transformed…and consequently lead to the true philosophy. To speak as did Pascal: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers, whether he be a material or ideal principle, carries with him the triumph of constraint, of brutal force. That is why speculation has always so obstinately defended the universality and necessity of its truths. The truth spares no one, no one can escape it; it is this, this alone, that has enticed the philosophers…But Jerusalem holds only to this truth. The constraining truths, and even the truths which seek the approbation and fear the reprobation of autonomous ethics - those eternal truths which, according to Leibniz, were introduced into the mind of God without asking His permission - not only do not persuade Jerusalem but are, on the contrary, the abomination of desolation. Within the "limits of reason" one can create a science, a sublime ethic, and even a religion; but to find God one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason with all its physical and moral constraints, and go to another source of truth. In Scripture this source bears the enigmatic name "faith," which is that dimension of thought where truth abandons itself fearlessly and joyously to the entire disposition of the Creator: "Thy will be done!" The will of Him who, on his side, fearlessly and with sovereign power returns to the believer his lost power: . . . "what things soever ye desire . . . ye shall have them."

…Can we "understand," can we grasp, what the prophets and the apostles announce in Scripture? Will Athens ever consent to allow such "truths" to come into the world?... Faith, only the faith that looks to the Creator and that He inspires, radiates from itself the supreme and decisive truths condemning what is and what is not. Reality is transfigured…

…The power of the biblical revelation - what there is in it of the incomparably miraculous and, at the same time, of the absurdly paradoxical, or, to put it better, its monstrous absurdity - carries us beyond the limits of all human comprehension and of the possibilities which that comprehension admits. For God, however, the impossible does not exist. God - to speak the language of Kierkegaard, which is that of the Bible - God: this means that there is nothing that is impossible. And despite the Spinozist interdictions, fallen man aspires, in the final analysis, only to the promised "nothing will be impossible for you"; only for this does he implore the Creator. It is here that religious philosophy takes its rise. Religious philosophy is not a search for the eternal structure and order of immutable being; it is not reflection (Besinnung); it is not an understanding of the difference between good and evil, an understanding that falsely promises peace to exhausted humanity. Religious philosophy is a turning away from knowledge and a surmounting by faith, in a boundless tension of all its forces, of the false fear of the unlimited will of the Creator, that fear which the tempter suggested to Adam and which he has transmitted to all of us. To put it another way, religious philosophy is the final, supreme struggle to recover original freedom and the divine "very good" which is hidden in that freedom and which, after the fall, was split into our powerless good and our destructive evil. Reason, I repeat, has ruined faith in our eyes; it has "revealed" in it man's illegitimate pretension to subordinate the truth to his desires, and it has taken away from us the most precious of heaven's gifts - the sovereign right to participate in the divine "let there be" - by flattening out our thought and reducing it to the plane of the petrified "it is."

...Human wisdom is foolishness before God, and the wisest of men, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, however unlike each other, both perceived, is the greatest of sinners. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin. As for the philosophy that does not dare to rise above autonomous knowledge and autonomous ethics, the philosophy that bows down will-lessly and helplessly before the material and ideal "data" discovered by reason and that permits them to pillage and plunder the "one thing necessary" - this philosophy does not lead man towards truth but forever turns him away from it.

Shestov's development as a thinker lead him to undertake a vast critique of the history of Western philosophy which he saw broadly as a monumental battle between Reason and Faith, Athens and Jerusalem, secular and religious outlook.

As Czeslaw Milosz writes:

Shestov opposed Jerusalem to Athens in a most radical, uncompromising manner. Those names stood for faith versus reason, revelation versus speculation, the particular versus the general...

and this from John Bayley:

Before he died, Shestov realized a longcherished dream when he was invited to lecture in Jerusalem, where his grandfather had been buried and where in his old age he was hailed as one of the great Jewish thinkers of the century.

To such a thinker God's existence is no problem, for a Jew's existence is that of Godhead. Where Kierkegaard had to strive and suffer to realize himself as a "knight of the faith," Shestov could identify himself tranquilly in that faith with the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, which had made Jews so much hated and feared by Christians who had come to realize-consciously or unconsciously-that their God was mortal and had no resurrection. Shestov insists on a logic which only his race could command. "Man must himself become God"- (as the Jews once did) -"create all things out of nothing; all things, matter together with forms, and even the eternal laws."

And this by Bernard Martin:

In his last years Shestov brooded incessantly over what he called, in a letter to Bulgakov, "the nightmare of godlessness and unbelief which has taken hold of humanity." He was convinced that only through "the utmost spiritual effort," as he termed it, could men free themselves from this nightmare. His own life was concentrated on a passionate struggle against the "self-evident" truths of speculative philosophy and positivistic science which had come to dominate the mind of European man and made him oblivious to the rationally ungrounded but redeeming truths proclaimed in the Bible. This struggle is most fully reflected in his last and greatest book, the monumental Athens and Jerusalem, on which he worked for many years and completed just a year before his death.

In it he set himself the task of critically examining the pretension of human reason to possession of the capacity for attaining ultimate truth... This pretension, he concluded, must be firmly rejected...Shestov repeatedly insists in Athens and Jerusalem...European man, according to Shestov,[18] has languished for centuries in a hypnotic sleep induced by the conviction that the entire universe is ruled by eternal, self-evident truths (such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction) discoverable by reason, and by an everlastingly unalterable and indifferent power which determines all events and facts. This power is commonly known as "necessity."...To resist the self-evident truths of science and philosophy, to stop glorifying and worshipping them, however, is not necessarily an exercise in futility.

If man will attend to the ancient message of the Bible, Shestov maintains, he will find there a conception of God, of the universe and of himself that not only lends meaning to such resistance but also makes of it the first and most essential step in becoming reconciled with God and regaining his freedom. For the Bible, in opposition to Western science and philosophy, proclaims that God is the omnipotent One for whom literally nothing is impossible and whose power is absolutely without limits, and that He stands not only at the center but at the beginning and end of all things. God, according to the Bible, created man as well as a universe in which there is no defect, a universe which - indeed - He saw to be "very good." Having created man, God blessed him, gave him dominion over all the universe and bestowed upon him the essentially divine and most precious of all gifts, freedom.

...There can be no reconciliation, Shestov contends,[23] between science and that philosophy which aspires to be scientific, on the one side, and biblical religion, on the other. Tertullian was right in proclaiming that Athens can never agree with Jerusalem - even though for two thousand years the foremost thinkers of the Western world have firmly believed that a reconciliation is possible and have bent their strongest and most determined efforts toward effecting it. The biblical revelation not only cannot be harmonized with rationalist or would-be "scientific" metaphysics but is itself altogether devoid of support either from logical argument or scientific knowledge. For biblical man based his life totally and unreservedly on faith, which is not, as has often been suggested, a weaker form of knowledge (knowledge, so to speak, "on credit," for which proofs, though presently unavailable, are anticipated at some future time), but rather a completely different dimension of thought. The substance of this faith, emphatically denied both by science and philosophy, is the daring and unsupported but paradoxically true conviction that all things are possible.

I think the relevance of Shestovian thought is apparent to in the genuine approach of the Tesha residents.


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The 'Penny Philospher': Anat Biletzki in the NYTimes

There's a Hebrew slang term: "philosophia b'grush", being a philospher for a penny, or, it doesn't cost much to pretend to be smart.

That came to mind reading Anat Biletzki's piece in the NYTimes in a column called The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. Her essay is the subject of this week’s forum discussion among the humanists and scientists at On the Human, a project of the National Humanities Center. Biletzki is Albert Schweitzer Professor of Philosophy at Quinnipiac University and professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and from 2001 to 2006 she was chairperson of B’Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Those  "rights" are those of Arabs; Jews are virtually ignored except to be castigated, maligned and attacked.

When I read "The Stone", my first thought was Anat is referring to the stones the Arabs, young and old, men and women, throw at we Jewish residents in the region of Judea and Samaria. Then, when I saw the word "sacred", I thought of the Even Shtiya, the stone on the Temple Mount, another peice of territory that the Arabs have appropriated for themselves and have been desecrating and working hard to destroy any Jewish connection to that site.

B'tselem is a far left-wing, nigh post-Zionist fringe group with a lot of European money that seeks to suibvert democracy as Murdoch subverts journalism and politics in the UK. Financial leverage gives her, along with her degree and academic position, and her comrades-in-strife, an advantage but it doesn't make them just.

For her, Jews have no "rights" in Judea and Samaria. Jewish history is invalidated. International legality of Jews therein is ignored and belittled.

And so, that Hebrew phrase, "philosophia b'grush", being a philosopher for a penny, assumes an additional metaphorical meaning.

A long extract from the piece (it is philosphy after all):

in a recent book, “The Idea of Human Rights,” Michael Perry is unequivocal about the worthlessness of the secular bunch: “[T]here is, finally, no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are religious.” Think of conspicuous elements in the vocabulary of human rights, the notions of “dignity,” “inviolable,” “end in himself” and the like. Although we try to give them meaning and standing without a turn to religious essence, these terms hold no secular water according to thinkers like Perry. There can be no human dignity, no inviolable person, no end in herself, without the supposition of the human as sacred, and therefore as a godly creation.

There is, however, no philosophically robust reason to accept this claim...dignity and inviolability certainly do not need to be tied down to the sacred.

Aristotelian virtue and natural justice or the Kantian categorical imperative (arising from reason, of course) offer philosophical bases for morality at large. Theories of human needs, human interests and human agency provide analytical foundations for the idea of human rights...Why do we care, or why should we care, if the practice of human rights is born of religious or secular motivation?

Take a look at how we work on the ground, so to speak; look at how we do human rights, for example, in Israel-Palestine. When Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, squats in the mud trying to stop soldiers who have come to set a blockade around a village or fights settlers who have come to uproot olive trees (as he has done so often, in villages like Yanoun and Jamain and Biddu, in the last decade) along with me (from B’Tselem — the Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), or a group of secular kids from Anarchists Against the Wall, or people from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions — and he does this on a Friday afternoon, knowing full well that he might be courting religious transgression should the Sabbath arrive — does it matter that his reasons for doing so spring from his faith while the anarchists’ derive from their secular political worldview and B’Tselem’s and ICAHD’s from secular international human rights law? The end-product, the human rights activity, is similar, even identical; but the reason, the intention, the motivation for it are distinctly different. Does that matter?

... religious authority must vacate the arena of human rights...religion, even when indirectly in the service of human rights, is not really working for human rights. Although there is recognition of the human as sacred, it is not the concept of rights that propels the religious person...

The question, we have seen, is what functions as the source of moral authority, assuming that “human rights” are morally based. Hilary Putnam, in “Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life,” says it beautifully: “Every human being should experience him/herself as commanded to be available to the neediness, the suffering, the vulnerability of the other person.” But notice Putnam’s terminology: “commanded.” Who commands us? The question boils down to who or what is the source of moral authority, God or the human being, religion or ethics? I want to say that that makes a great difference. And I want to ask: If we — the religious person and the secular person — end up engaging in the same activity and also, more so, do it by thinking of ourselves as available to another’s neediness, why does it make a difference?

...when we disagree — about abortion, about capital punishment, about settling occupied lands — that the religious authority must vacate the arena of human rights.

Ah, Anat.  Are those lands "occupied"?  What does secular law say?  What does secular history recount?  And if the Arabs act out of fanatic religious motivation, against Jews per se, against women who they oppress and kill for reasons of "honor", are you with them depsite your religious/cultural heritage?

You note:

Had God’s angel failed to call out — “Abraham! Abraham!” — Abraham would have slain Isaac.

But, the point is, he didn't.  He stayed the hand of Abraham.

She continues:

...Let me, then, make explicit the definition of religion at the root of my unrest: Religion is a system of myth and ritual; it is a communal system of propositional attitudes — beliefs, hopes, fears, desires — that are related to superhuman agents...For some, the physics that runs the natural world and the ethics that provide for our moral sense are seen to be more ordinary than religious experience. I, on the other hand, can think of nothing more awe inspiring than humanity and its fragility and its resilience.

So, in her negativism, she assumes a superiority that cannot even be justified by secular values but she desires to portray an inferior rights claim for Jews while disregarding the claims of Islam and Arab nationalism.

Anat, ah. It is all politics.


P.S. I got two comments in there at the NYT wed site.


http://community.nytimes.com/comments/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/the-sacred-and-the-humane/?permid=14#comment14

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/the-sacred-and-the-humane/?permid=21#comment21

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Vulgarity as The New Value

I caught this thought while wandering about:-

Vulgarity has always played a critical role in Western culture, of course (think Aristophanes, Socrates, and dung). The only difference nowadays is that smart intellectuals, especially in universities, treat it as profound stuff, philosophizing about such pop-cult phenomena as Lady Gaga as if these things are no different from philosophizing about the nature of the soul.

Now, while that represent Laurie Fendrich's opinion on an issue that has nothing to do with the Middle East, I am going to borrow her paradigm.

As Fendrich ends off her piece, what is really at the bottom (pardon the pun) of vulgarity in culture and, as I will claim, politics as well, is this

Her message is simple: All they need for happiness is some outrageous faux-slutty behavior.

Our university education progressive radicals seem to feel that terror, support of terror and denial of quite clear rights concerning the Arab-Israel Conflict (it has really little to do with something called "Palestine") is fashionable. And to be fashionable, a la Gaga, is to be slutty, to be morally and ethicall vulgar in your politics and public actions.

You can lie, deny, engage in upsidedowning of the facts, portray reality as it isn't. And that will make you an honorary member of the new Vulgar Generation.

You will bandy about terms like "human rights", "resistance", "right of return" and on with no true understanding of their meaning or frame of historical and legal reference.

Only Jews are to be blamed, for the Pals. are "victims", and it is quite alright to make snide antisemitic references and then protect yourself by claiming you are just anti-Zionist (which also includes the right to deny Jews their national existence).

I just have to use the F-word: -

fimicolous

And you know what, let's use another F-word: -

feculent

P.S. I could have made this a 3,000 word essay but heck, you don't have the patience to read it and I don't have the patience to write it.

Keep it short and to the point, right?


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Memorable Words

Something false gave rise to something true...If it was an illusion, at least it was our illusion.

Tina Brown on the Susan Boyle phenomenom