How to philosophize in any language – Discussion with Shmuli – Transcript

Language, Concepts, and the Limits of Linguistic Determinism: A Philosophical Examination

Introduction: The Question of Linguistic Conceptual Differences

Student: Okay, so this is our yearly, what is it? Hybrid student on camera. Oh, the student on camera is here. All right. What’s it about? So, it’s about a question I had from, I need to, what do I need to do? I’ll just flip it and ask. It makes it nicer. Flip it on your shirt. I hope it works.

So the question that we had, or the question that I was curious about, started from something that I’d heard regarding there being differences in languages and people’s ability to understand things based on the language that they speak or think in or are accustomed to. So the first example that we gave was in Greek, for example, there’s three words for love: *agape*, *eros*, and *philia*, probably more. And English, we have one word, or maybe more, but the one word that these are usually translated to is love.

So the question was, if there’s something about our understanding of love that would change based on language that we are using and thinking in, do we want to go even further than that into…

Instructor: Right. And the, the that you were saying from someone is that, therefore we’re bad people because we speak English and not Greek.

Student: Yeah, yeah, or at least we’re missing something in our understanding of love based on that.

Parallel Arguments: Secular and Religious Versions

Instructor: And everything that follows. And I guess they’re similar. This is the secular conservative version of *Adrusha* [a Torah discourse/sermon] that you can hear from many, a certain style of *mashgiach* [spiritual supervisor/ethics teacher in a yeshiva], a mussar influence style person, or like, did he know that in Hebrew there’s no word for fun? He shows you that fun is a fake thing. What you should be doing is something called *oneg* [delight/pleasure] and *simcha* [joy], which is somehow distinct from fun and so on. Yeah, the same kind of argument.

And I think also the more, the common Jewish argument, the theological argument that the language in which you’re, you’re…

Student: Right, the concept of *Lashon HaKodesh* [the Holy Tongue; Hebrew].

Instructor: Right, the concept of *Lashon HaKodesh* is something that has, right, provided that that’s something that we can, that’s relevant to us in any way. If that has any bearing on our understanding of things because of the conceptual structure of what are our texts.

Student: Yeah, that’s the question of translation, translation of sacred texts.

The Core Thesis: These Arguments Are Only Good Halfway

Instructor: So what I was saying, I’m never supposed to refer to something that nobody knows about. Anyways, what we’re saying is that I think that these kind of arguments are only good halfway.

Because, in other words, if someone wants to make an argument that fun is a weird concept, nobody knows what it is, it’s American, it’s something that’s conditional on a certain American culture, I guess, is fun an American invention? Having a good time, fun, things like that, and the way in which we understand it has to do with this whole network of meaning in this culture, like “we’re going to have fun,” “is this fun,” what kinds of cultural discussion language that works like that. And he would say that that is a bad way of understanding the world. Human beings don’t really like to have what you think fun is, or maybe you would say something like only part of what you include in fun is the real fun, or you combine with something else to be really fun or pleasurable or a good time or something like that.

That is a really serious argument. That’s a philosophical argument, right? It’s not a philological argument. It’s not an etymological argument of what fun—it’s not contingent on the question if there’s a word for fun in Hebrew. If it would be a word, you could still make the same argument in Hebrew. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. Those are questions of translation.

The Problem with Philological Claims

And it’s very even, it’s even very hard to make these claims because of each language having its own network of semantics, where everything connects into everything else. And we don’t speak Hebrew. We don’t really know how they would say what we call fun. Maybe they wouldn’t say it, but we don’t really know that. But in any case, I think it is safe to assume that there’s probably, probably had fun, probably…

Student: Yeah, people used to have fun.

Instructor: I think it’s hard to, again, no, so wait, we got this. There’s, there’s love, there’s always this question: are all experiences that we have, are they really universal, how universal are they, and so on.

But the interesting thing is that this kind of argument is a good argument provided you take out the language claims from it. Because if you say, “I think that people are confused about what fun is, about what having a good time is,” you can make that argument in any language. And if you say, “Look, I’ve used this sign, this fact that we, you know, we’re also American, West, whatever, European, I don’t know, Western culture”—nobody knows what West means, so I don’t know. But anyways, people, and therefore, and since we’re also Jewish, and we think that the language of the *Tanakh* [the Hebrew Bible] is important, so noticing that there’s no word for fun should cause you to be able to examine how you think fun is and therefore to see something better.

Yeah, that’s a somewhat contingent fact that this has caused you to see the world better. And even meaning, and even if you would, let’s say, dismiss fun, you would do that by making it subservient to something that fun is at least trying to approximate, like real pleasure, real enjoyment, or something like that, not necessarily just doing away with it as its own category.

I’m just saying this is not in our language so it shouldn’t exist. I think anyone making such a claim is basically doing that because they’re not saying you shouldn’t enjoy anything in life or you shouldn’t be happy or something like that. They’re saying that fun in the way that we tend to understand it is weird or incomplete or not incorrect. And he could, I’m saying, the argument can’t entirely consist of the language because usually when people say there’s no word for this, you should at least be very skeptical of such arguments.

Why We Should Be Skeptical of “No Word For X” Claims

Mostly because very few people speak two languages fully. In English, there’s no word for half of the things, because we borrow all our terms from German and from Latin, so what’s English anyways? But in order to describe our life fully in English, we could do it in English, provided that we use all these borrowed terms with the funny spellings. So would that show that English by itself doesn’t have words for all the French cognates, things in English?

That’s not the argument. Obviously people in English—in other words, when people learn two languages, what I mean to say something maybe interesting: when people know more than one language, they end up using different languages for different registers of their experience. There’s interesting linguistic arguments about English, how we’re generally the higher level things are the Latin words and the lower level things are the German words, like the difference between—industrial words are usually German, right?

Student: Yeah.

Instructor: But there’s all these kinds of, some of them are historical, some of them are some kind of explanation for why they’re that way. Greek suffixes also usually end with prefixes.

Student: Yeah, like they mean something, yeah.

The Reality of Bilingualism and Semantic Networks

Instructor: But what I’m saying is, what does this mean? And I think no one would disagree that certain languages have a smaller lexicon, reference to certain concepts. Right, so for example, in the same way, if you’re a Jewish guy, that’s what I’m—if you’re a Jewish guy, every Jewish guy since the times of, I guess, the times of the *Mishnah* [the first major written collection of Jewish oral law], at least, speaks two languages. Judaism is a minority culture. You have to speak also the majority language. There’s no way around it, basically.

Famously, the *Mishnah* is full of Greek, and everyone that spoke in the *Mishnah* also knew some Greek, probably some kind of level of conversational Greek, or later Latin, because that’s the language that people spoke. And that means that you know for certain terms we only know how to say them in Greek and certain terms we as this hybrid kind of people only know how to say them in Hebrew. Some people like the *Arukh* [a Talmudic dictionary] is basically trying to do this, right?

For example, or the other way around. Like people say, how do you say *davening* [Jewish prayer/praying] in English? Well, there’s—you don’t bother in English. You could pray, but you can’t daven. And praying and *davening* are slightly different things. When you explain to the *goyim* [non-Jews] what you’re doing, if I were going to pray, but we don’t pray, we daven. So that’s just more, more walking in the back.

Student: Yeah, it’s both more and less than, right? It doesn’t have the same connotations as prayer.

Anecdote: Heschel, Davening, and Prayer

Instructor: I told you the story with Rabbi, from *Chabad* [Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement]? No. Art Green told me a story that he was in the JTS [Jewish Theological Seminary] building, and what’s his name, Professor, this big scholar, I forgot his name—and there was this year, no, it was a big *lit* [Lithuanian-style yeshiva scholar]—*Lita* [Lithuania] was basically *Shiva* [the seven days of mourning] for the most part—and it was Rabbi, I forgot his name. Anyways, it’s *lit*. And they’re sitting in this *maariv* [evening prayer service] at night. No, no, later. I don’t mind. I forget names. I’m not good at this.

And he’s like, “Let’s find, we’d have to have a *maariv*, let’s find a *minyan* [prayer quorum of ten Jewish men].” So the other guy says—two very old Jewish, you know, Talmud professors—and the other guy says, “Okay, so maybe we should call the Rebbe.” So Heschel [Abraham Joshua Heschel, prominent Jewish theologian and philosopher] was professor there, and they used to make fun of him. They used to call him the Rebbe. He used to have a basement room or something.

Student: Yeah, but he wasn’t officially a professor, but he was a *chassidish* [Hasidic] guy. He wasn’t as academic and Talmudic as them, so they didn’t take him seriously.

Instructor: So he said, “Let’s call the Rebbe, maybe he’ll be *mashlim* [complete] our *minyan*.” The other guy says, “Nah, the Rebbe doesn’t believe in *davening*. The Rebbe believes not in prayer.” You know, Heschel’s big thing was translating these Jewish *davening* things to prayer. But anyways, two different things.

So if someone comes and says, “Well, there’s no *Erechid* [?] in *Nefrit* [?],” there’s these kind of jokes: there’s no *davening* in English, there’s no *davening* in Yiddish, there’s no prayer in Yiddish. Both of these things don’t exist. I’m sure there’s a German word that means prayer that we don’t use in Yiddish, but nobody knows. *Davening* is one of those famous Jewish words and nobody knows what they actually come from. It’s a mystery.

Anyways, but the point is not that—the only point is that this person speaks two languages and this area of his life—

Philosophy, Language, and the Impossibility of Inherited Wisdom

The Limits of Language and the Nature of Philosophical Maturity

The Anecdote of Heschel and the Problem of Translation

Instructor: So Heschel was the professor there and they used to make fun of him, they used to call him the Rebbe. He used to have like a basement room or something? Yeah, he was officially a professor, but he was a chassidish guy, he wasn’t as academic and Talmudic as them, so they didn’t take him seriously. So he said, let’s call the Rebbe, maybe he’ll be *mashlem* [complete/fulfill] Armenians. The other guy says, nah, the Rebbe doesn’t believe in *davening* [Yiddish: prayer], the Rebbe believes not in prayer. Heschel’s big thing was translating these Jewish *davening* things to prayer.

But anyways, two different things. So if someone comes and says, well, there’s no *erl’chid* [?] in Hebrew, there’s these kind of jokes—there’s no *davening* in Yiddish or no prayer, there’s no *davening* in English or prayer in Yiddish. Both of these things don’t exist. Like I’m sure there’s a German word that means prayer that we don’t use in Yiddish, but nobody knows. *Davening* is one of those famous Jewish words nobody knows what they actually come from. It’s like a mystery.

The Reality of Linguistic and Cultural Hybridity

Instructor: Anyways, but the point is not that. The only point is that this person speaks two languages unless this area of his life—like the Jewish area of my life—is ruled by the Hebrew language or this Jewish whatever, Yiddish, I don’t know whatever it is. It’s not ruled by the language of the same language I used to buy my groceries. And I have like my life somewhat split. You could, you know, you could be dirty like now, you could say that this is good or bad, but this is just the reality though. It doesn’t tell you much about the existence or non-existence of these areas. It just tells you that we’re a hybrid people and different areas of our life are connected with different cultures and different periods of history and different, I guess, maybe parts of the reality, and they have their own languages.

So I can talk about, with my neighbor that speaks only English, I can talk about my business, but I can’t really talk about my *davening* because I will have to translate it, and I don’t actually know how to say it in his words. Does that mean that it doesn’t exist in his words? It probably does. And if you find a different Jewish culture that doesn’t speak any Yiddish—they only speak Spanish or Judeo-Spanish or Arabic or anything—you could translate everything into those languages. And it will acquire those correct connotations.

The Challenge of Overcoming Translation Barriers

Instructor: The question is what it takes to overcome that difference. What it takes to overcome the language barrier or the translation barrier. Yeah, maybe it’s impossible because of people. Like my claim now is something like people maybe only speak one language. They just take different areas from different languages.

And maybe like for you, for most people that you know, like to say *Hashem* [the Name: God] and to say Allah mean different things, although they theoretically refer to the same being. But for people like Rav Saadia [Saadia Gaon, 882-942 CE, major Jewish philosopher] or the Rambam [Maimonides, 1138-1204 CE], they would say Allah, Allah Ta’ali [Allah the Exalted] for *Hashem* and it would literally mean *Hashem*. Like now if I want to switch registers I have to say *Hashem* or Allah, which one? Allah Ta’ali. God is a whole other—no, that’s a different guy for sure. But understand, understand, but there I’m literally meant what we mean by *Hashem* and could it translate? I don’t know.

You like a language includes the whole history of the person that speaks the language. Like you have to live that life in order to speak it that way. But it doesn’t mean—what I’m trying to make my important, more important point is—anyone that believes that there is thought beyond language but the language is about a reality, it’s not like you’re not a full constructivist, like language doesn’t create its reality, it might reveal reality to you, but it doesn’t create the reality. Therefore you can’t say that the fact that we don’t have a certain word, don’t speak a certain language, denies us access to that reality.

Language as Revelation, Not Creation of Reality

Instructor: It might make it harder to us, because maybe some languages are better at revealing, like cutting reality at its joints, right? They’re better at revealing how reality is really, than others. Like missing some parts, like maybe the fact that you don’t have a word for holiness in English, or you could say holiness, but maybe it’s not the same thing as *Kedusha* [holiness], and so on. Maybe that causes you to not be able to understand, but you probably are able to collaborate together the concept from thinking. Does that make sense?

Too low on my direction. I think, I think I like the point that we were speaking about earlier about using philosophy as a means to overcome the barrier.

The Negative Argument: Why Language Barriers Don’t Deny Access to Reality

Instructor: So the important thing, the next thing that I’m saying is that—but this is the negative part. This is why I don’t think that these arguments, the language by itself is a good argument. But what I do think is that no language is the important claim of philosophy.

What Philosophy Actually Is: The Socratic Definition

Instructor: Even the word philosophy is a bad word. Philosophy is literally the word that Socrates made up to describe what he was doing. And, of course, the Toys for Snowbodies [?], so it’s been Judaized a long time ago. We could say the word philosophy, but it also has so many connotations and so on. In the Muslim context, being a philosopher means being an Aristotelian as opposed to a *Kalam* [Islamic theology], a theologian and so on. And it has so many meanings, this word.

But philosophy in the Socratic term, which is the more abstract way I think of it, is the claim and the practice that says that people are not born with the full view of reality. And that, I guess that’s a claim that’s shared by a lot more theories than philosophy. And philosophy is the claim that by examining the words that you use—in some sense you could say by examining language, although that’s not the way it would be put originally—but by examining the ways in which you think, which are the words, but we’re not examining the words, we’re examining the world by way of the words that you are taught, you are brought up to think, and the categories you’re brought up to think in. By examining them, you can discover the truer alignment of reality. You can discover how things really are from your mistaken views of what they seem to be.

So, the movement from seems to is, is what philosophy claims.

Philosophy Cannot Be Inherited or Culturally Given

Instructor: And therefore, philosophy cannot abide by any claim that says that if you would have only been brought up in the correct culture, you would have been a philosopher from birth. There kind of isn’t—I think this is one important like educational ideal—there isn’t a possibility of someone being born with the correct ideas, because correct ideas is not a final thing. It’s not something that you’re like having, like we say, having like on your head. Correct ideas is something that takes work, maturation, and not like an inheritance, right? It’s not inheritance. Like it says, Torah is not an inheritance. Of course, there’s an inheritance, but that’s not that. But it is from the inheritance. That would be the next but.

The important thing is that nobody is brought up a philosopher. In the same way that no child is born with a full set of teeth or something, like actual full set of teeth. There’s certain maturation that a human being necessarily has to go through because of what a human being is. Like if you’d be an angel or a separate intellect or a god or something, you wouldn’t have this. But what a human being is, is a kind of thing that matures, and there’s all kinds of different kinds of maturation. Like you can have physical maturation, age of majority, you have sexual maturation, you have emotional maturation or some level of intellectual maturation, and so on.

And the philosophy’s claim is that there is also a philosophical maturity, like what Socrates called knowing yourself, understanding what’s going on, and that that isn’t necessarily something acquired. Nobody is born with that. It’s impossible to be born with that. You can’t even be mad at your parents for teaching you their own beliefs, because it’s not their job to teach you the correct—not their job to make you into a philosopher. It’s your own job, always.

Against the “Wrong Generation/Wrong Culture” Lament

Instructor: So in that sense, this is, I guess, I’m going to make it into another negative claim. Like saying, oh, if I would have been brought up in the correct society, I would have, you know, it’s a shame—like a lot of these like more conservative or like more like, again, both the non-Jewish and the Jewish conservative kind of speeches end up saying, it’s a shame that you were born in the wrong generation because, or in the wrong culture, because in this other culture, they think of things much more correctly.

That is slightly true, of course, because you could have better or worse starting points, and that’s very important. But as regards to the level of maturity that philosophy is demanding, it’s never really as useful as you think, because there’s no society in which you could grow up and be a philosopher. You’re always going to have to break through the seeming of things to the reality of things. Make sense?

Student Question: Does Language Impose Limits on Thought?

Student: Yeah, I guess maybe this is like the entire opposite side of the coin from what we’re saying, but there’s, I guess, a lot of conversation about, and I think from this conversation, maybe it changes the view a little bit on language necessarily. Like there being limits imposed on thought because of language, that somehow the way that the tool that’s used to understand reality and express it maybe has in it some sort of limit. I don’t know if that ever, if I ever really thought that was the case. I think we’re creative enough with language that if you take enough time you can usually eventually identify the reality that’s being discussed. But I guess, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on what people mean when they say that there’s a limit imposed on thought by language.

The Instructor’s Response: Against Hard Linguistic Determinism

Instructor: Yeah. I don’t think anyone, I don’t know if anyone is really like a linguistic determinist all the way. I’m thinking Wittgenstein offhand. But he doesn’t really think that. He thinks that, whatever, I’m not going to make any claims about Wittgenstein. But I don’t think that’s what you end up saying. People might interpret it that way.

But I think those—you have to remember that all people are bad at thought. It takes an exceptional person to have one thought. So whenever someone says, well, this smart philosopher said this, you have to always be skeptical of that. I don’t think that it’s true.

So again, I don’t think anyone really says, but like that delay—

Breaking Free from Language: Philosophy, Technical Vocabulary, and the Necessity of Dialectic

Skepticism Toward Philosophical Authority

Instructor: People might interpret it that way, but I think those… You have to remember that most all people are bad at thought. It takes like an exceptional person to have one thought. So whenever someone says well this smart philosopher said this, you have to always always be skeptical of that. I don’t think that it’s true. So again even with yeah, I don’t think anyone really says the language that you brought up, even Wittgenstein when he talks about language.

No, no, no, I’m talking about language on the fully universal level—meaning language itself as a tool, as a medium.

Distinguishing Levels of Language Discussion

Particular Languages vs. Language as Such

Instructor: First we were talking about differences that still exist between languages. Like someone said that English is a bad philosophical language—if you would speak Greek it would be better, or the opposite. English is like a very big language. It’s very hard to make claims about it, to just have a certain sentence construction and things like that. Someone would say that. I sort of think that this is too deterministic to be correct.

In other words, let’s just say that if we get to like the fully general claims about language, we have to think about separately, I guess. But to stay at the level of like, if you’re brought up, and again, when we say language, we don’t only mean languages and the words—mean the full connotation, that the whole world, the culture, language is culture.

Language as Culture and Canon

Instructor: A language means a canon. Like in school, they say, we’re teaching you English. And I mean the English canon, like the books written in English or the books that people that consider themselves English read and refer to, like the sources of their sayings and idioms and constructions and things like that.

The Necessity of Breaking Out of Language

The Wittgensteinian Problem

Instructor: I think that you have to at least leave some space for breaking out of language, because if it’s true that the whole point of maturity of philosophical maturity is to stop thinking that everything is as it seems—and as it seems literally means as it is spoken of, in other words as your mother tongue says as things—then if it would be true that language, the limits of your language is the limit of your world—is that something that someone said?

Student: Yeah.

Instructor: Then it would be impossible to ever think anything. We would all be LLMs [Large Language Models]. Which most of us are, to be clear, right? And most of us are most of the time.

Philosophy vs. Mysticism: The Activity of Thought

Instructor: But since we, like our big hope and desire, like people say it’s mystical. I don’t think it’s mystical. I think it’s philosophical. Because mystical usually tends to mean another set of beliefs, which is just more words. So you could pour all of mysticism into the same LLM and it will output Kabbalah. That’s not the point, right?

Mystical is the sense of the, like, activity, right? I like the word activity, like the here and now of thought, like being stumpedness of thought, like noticing something that breaks out of your categories, like, right, that’s what thought has to be, because I’m, like, where I notice something and I’m able to notice it, and this is, like, a mystery.

The Meno Paradox and Knowing That You Don’t Know

Instructor: How can I notice it if I don’t have some, you know, Meno paradox? Maybe I must have known it somehow, but it wasn’t actual to me and so on. But in any case, in this life, in this incarnation, I don’t really know it, but I can know that I don’t know it, and then I’m breaking through.

And contradiction brings this into view.

Student: Yes.

Instructor: Socratic contradiction was supposed to work to do this. But contradiction works by pushing together through things that you already think you know. Right? And then, so you have to believe that you’re not fully determined by the language you speak. I think that that follows from that.

No Culture Is Imprisoned by Its Language

The Creation of Technical Vocabulary

Instructor: Which also means the next step—it also means that you’re never going to be, there’s no culture that is limited by its language, because I guess the next step after like having thought is to use words in new ways or to construct new words or to new sentences, like new configurations of words at least. Like every, like basically every science does this. People are very surprised when they notice the signs that they wouldn’t expect doing it, but every single science has something called a technical vocabulary which is just made up words because the commonplace words are not enough to represent the result of the epiphany.

Student: Yeah.

The Challenge of Learning Technical Terms Without the Epiphany

Instructor: And they’re supposed to now, of course after you learn—unless you’ve learned them without learning the epiphany behind, right? And you, right, that’s the challenge. Like Aristotle says many people repeat Empedocles by well-drunk, which means they’re not scientists, even though Empedocles was a great scientist. Just being able to repeat his words doesn’t make you a great scientist.

But it does mean that theoretically nobody’s ever stuck, no language is stuck in itself. No language must see. There’s like a predefined way in which a language forces you to see the world, because seeing the world through a language, starting from your assumptions, starting from your seeming, starting from how it seems to you, how it seems to everyone you know, you can break that or smash that against each other, smash the words against each other until they create new words.

Technical Language as Variant, Not Replacement

Instructor: And then you give birth to what’s sometimes called a technical language, like a specific language that is more accurate. But that technical language would still be, if it’s done in English, it would still be English or some variant of English. Like, is Kabbalah written in Hebrew or Aramaic? I don’t know. It’s written in some technical variant of it, right?

And then yeah, that that’s what what should happen if you’re if you’re thinking. I’d like the the example that you mentioned with the with rest as like ah right ah so now yeah that I think the I have to talk about the illustration of it, yeah, right.

The Crucial Turn: Philosophy Must Be Done Through Your Language

Why You Must Start From Your Own Language

Instructor: But so that’s that’s about another point. Now since we don’t think that you’re stuck in your language and you have to get unstuck from your language, now what I want to add is that the progress, this maturation of philosophy needs to be done through your language. This is where I do go back to start needing to start from needing to philosophize in the language that you are brought up in.

And that is because if philosophy would have been this pure world of prepositions [propositions] that we just bump into people’s hands and we could teach them somehow, then in a similar way to which we teach technical arts, which not everyone has to re-derive how carpentry works to be a good carpenter, you just get taught the formulas of creating tables and things, then we wouldn’t have to start with your language.

The Example of Technical Fields and English Dominance

Instructor: And that’s why like you know all technical, the whole technical basically speaks English now. Like all computer science is done in English and it doesn’t, the fact that someone speaks Chinese or German or Hebrew or something as its first language and then his you know computer science is entirely English or biology, most science, they’re not on the English.

Student: Someone from Tel Aviv you said, yeah, the way it works is in business, you do the negotiation in English, and then the shmiz [informal chat/gossip] afterward you could do in Hebrew.

Instructor: That’s even the business, but even the technical part for sure is in English, right?

Student: Yeah, yeah, yes.

Why Technical Fields Don’t Need Native Languages

Instructor: There isn’t any, I think like one Chinese programming language or something, but basically no culture even has like a point of national pride to create programming in their language. Nobody cares. And I think the thought behind it is that it’s not in English either. It happens to be using a technical variant of English, but it’s really describing things that most English people don’t know.

As you see a function, it means one thing to a computer scientist and something else to normal people. And yet a third thing to a trillion philosophers, and so on. And it’s just like there’s no reason to translate it because it’s not connecting to the person that you are.

Technical Vocabulary and Its Limited Connection to Ordinary Language

Instructor: Someone who knows what an object is according to computer science or data or a function or anything like that is not supposed to reconfigure his regular understanding of what a function is. It does, by the way, but not supposed to. It does, because everything does that. That’s why the computer science people all think that God is a computer, and therefore a computer can be God. You get stuck in this. But it’s not supposed to, at least. You’re not supposed to make a technical vocabulary.

I think it’s also safe to say that technical languages usually also very specifically belong to their subject matter in ways that human languages don’t.

Student: Right.

Instructor: They’re barely English. Their connotations barely leak through. There’s something called a Linux daemon, which originally was named after the daemons of the philosophy of Platonism, but nobody thinks there’s a demon in your computer. I guess there’s some conspiracy theory that realized this already. Like a service, a program that runs without you asking it, it’s called a daemon in Linux, and just like demons are things that run without you asking them. But is there a demon in your computer? No, it’s not the same thing at all. Like just told the word.

Philosophy’s Distinctive Task: Refining What You Already Think

Philosophy vs. Technical Knowledge

Instructor: But will like philosophy is supposed to be refining the things you already think. It’s supposed to make you discover what you already think. So in other words to go back to our fun example, doing philosophy is supposed to teach you what you want. You want to have fun and that’s not wrong. You just need to be refined. You need to know what, like Socrates says, what is really fun, right?

The Purification of “Fun”

Instructor: What is really fun is to be an eved Hashem [servant of God]. Because that’s what you meant when you said, well, it’s not fun. Yeah, it’s not fun because it doesn’t have the wrong aspects of having fun. There’s some impurities, we could say, involved in the concept of fun that most people have, but we’re purifying it by contradiction and discovering what fun really is, like what the pure version of it is. Really, the only really fun is to do philosophy.

The Necessity of Dialectic Over Dogma

Instructor: Anyways, you have to do dialectic to get to that, and doing it without a dialectic sounds like just a weird dogma that makes no sense, or even in Hebrew. That’s also just a dogmatic way of doing things. What we’re supposed to be doing is teaching you how what you want to do is really something else, or really only some slice of that.

The Untranslatability of Philosophical Dialectic: Why Ancient Philosophy Requires New Paths

The Loss of Dialectical Texture in Translation

Instructor: They sort of skipped every seam. Aristotle keeps on saying *dokkai*, seams. In the translation, it doesn’t shine through this seam. Or the steps of dialectic get sort of collapsed into something very dogmatic. That is good if you could reconstruct a dialectic. It doesn’t have to be in Greek. You don’t have to say the word that means whichever language you want, but you might not even have the same—forget about dialectical intricacies—you might not even have the same dialectical path, like when we spoke about activity and rest.

Student: Right, right, we have to get to this.

Instructor: Right, so I don’t want to go as far as those people, because those people end up saying that, well, most of those people try to say that, you know, Aristotle and Plato were much more skeptic than the medieval thought. I don’t think that’s correct. It’s just that they’re doing a lot more real dialectic.

In other words, the point of a dialogue is to get you from what a normal Greek guy thinks every time—a different kind of normal guy. But anyways, a normal guy, there’s no such thing as normal guy. Everyone has their own things. But a normal type of normal guy gets from the way he thinks to the way Socrates thinks.

And when you translate that in different languages, it’s very hard, both because:

– The translations are—like one argument, the translators are bad because they tend to lose this

– And second because I think this is the thing that’s not translatable precisely, because translating doesn’t mean translating the word for it, it means translating the whole culture

The Example of *Sophrosyne*: Why Cultural Context Cannot Be Translated

Instructor: And like if you go around—if Socrates goes around asking people what is *sophrosyne* [σωφροσύνη: temperance/self-control/moderation], and temperance is a bad translation because it doesn’t capture everything *sophrosyne* means, and you read the—like what’s it called, this dialogue about this—I forget names again—anyways, and like the big *kegdama* [קעגדאמא: Yiddish term, likely meaning “the whole thing” or “the main point”] that you get from everyone is like, well obviously in Greek.

So for us it includes a lot more than what we would include by our translation, because otherwise the dialect doesn’t make sense. And like, okay, now it still doesn’t make sense even after this explanation because you’re not talking to me, you’re talking to some guy in Athens.

If you want to talk to me, you want me to get to where Socrates wants to get, you will have to start with things that I believe. Maybe that’s why I tried to give a class on this and start from like something like what do we think addiction is, right? We didn’t do it here.

And why is addiction an absolving factor or something that makes the things you do worse or better, or makes you more or less responsible, things like that. And those are things that we actually think. We have this category of addiction in our culture. We sort of think we know what it means. Of course, it’s an incoherent concept, just like most concepts that people have when unexamined.

But I can try to get you from that to what, you know, what Aristotle thought temperance is. But from what’s some ancient Greek word that we could transliterate—something like that—and you could even use it as an English term, some translations just did that, but it doesn’t work for you because it doesn’t mean anything in your life. You’re going to go out of this classroom and you’re going to talk about what temperance—even temperance people don’t talk about anymore. We have a different vocabulary.

Does that mean that we don’t have moral concepts? Does that mean we don’t judge people for being—we have to remove like an example that someone might want to use as moderation, but then we also have to do dialectic to move past right connotations of suppression and that might not necessarily be contained in that concept.

Student: Right.

Instructor: So that’s what I’m saying. Not always—forget about not translating what’s the word for *aravinda* [ערווינדא] and *hamar* [חמר] and *zid* [זיד] instead of—yeah, right. You don’t—you don’t sometimes even have to move beyond abstract or not one-to-one translations, and you have to start from a whole different dialectical path and separate two different concepts that are conjoined.

Student: Right, probably, probably. And especially when we’re doing concepts like—it’s not just like names of people, the stocking—the stock—the stock people that you know, the John and Mary of that, of that world, of the world. How do you do in English? There’s like Alice and certain—come—yeah.

Instructor: And if you even beyond that, right? Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that like we might be confused from a totally different perspective. Our confusions are not the same. The truth is supposed to be the same, but that—since philosophy is in the dialectic, the way from our confusion to the truth are probably is going to be different.

The Fundamental Problem of Teaching Ancient Philosophy

Instructor: Yeah, I think I think that like most—most like ways of learning ancient philosophy are very confused because of this, because it’s very hard. And even if you do it, this can be speculative—like we don’t know if this is ending up where—well, just translating correctly and accurately academically is also speculative because we don’t even know what we’re talking about.

And once you do try to find out what you’re talking about, then you run the risk of like just translating everything into what you already think. If you never challenge what you already think, that’s not interesting either.

The Dilemma of Direct vs. Guided Reading

Student: What then would be like the best way to approach an older work that’s coming from a different language? I feel like sometimes—yeah, the direct reader might miss a lot, the guided reader might have a lot of assumptions stuffed in. I always wonder if there’s a good middle approach, because I think sometimes, at least for myself, I vacillate between those, because sometimes approaching the work directly, I can feel myself not inheriting their environment.

Instructor: I don’t think there’s a fully good answer. Like I think it has to be hard. It’s not supposed to be easy. There’s a certain degree of immersion that I think takes more discipline than I might give it, but there has to be a certain—well, a lot of immersion.

Like one solution which is only halfway the solution is to like notice the foreignness, but I think that that’s not a good solution entirely because it might be more familiar than you think. And only if you have someone guiding you through it instead of just misapplying the concept, which I think even experienced readers do from time to time, just from a total inability to inherit the author’s culture—just try, even sometimes it’s a good effort, but maybe an incorrect one to just assume that the concept maps out to something else.

Student: Right.

Case Study: Aristotle’s *Nicomachean Ethics* and the Problem of Happiness

Teaching Backwards from the Conclusion

Instructor: Like, I think that it might be easier to see the conclusion and reason backwards, like if you’re teaching or learning. Something like, you know, Aristotle’s whole first book of the ethics is about discovering what happiness really is, right? And I think we know what the result is. It’s much harder for us to reconstruct the way, which means it’s much harder for us to believe his answer.

Because happiness is a human being humaning the best way possible, something like that. And that—why would I care? Like he starts off with something and says like, well, everyone agrees that happiness is the best thing. And when now when modern readers read that they say like, I don’t know what happiness is, what are you saying?

Student: And they know we’re asking something called the best thing.

Instructor: Yeah, they definitely don’t know how one would get—even working through all of his arguments—how one would get from happiness to being a good human. Like those seem to be different things.

Student: Yeah.

The Impossibility of Retracing Aristotle’s Original Path

Instructor: Yeah, we can do a lot of, like, explaining of why it should be the same thing and so on, but we’ll never get in this way to the, like, very simple derivation that he thinks it works. Like, it has to be at least, even rhetorically it’s supposed to work, right? It’s dialectic, which is better than rhetoric. But it’s supposed to work in the sense of, like, you’re supposed to be able to go to a guy and say, well, what do you think is the best thing?

It turns out, well, now most people end up saying there’s no best thing. Okay, there’s supposed to be a way to get from there, too. There’s like an explanation of Plato if this is true, but I think there’s a way. And the way would work through like what people already believe, starting to like—I say smash together the things that you think.

And it would definitely probably not be the road that Aristotle travels. He would travel a different road. There might be many roads. There might not be one. There are many roads that lead to the truth. Doesn’t—the roads don’t have to be the same. The truth, the end result has to be the same. And the road that you travel probably also—so now this is then the right—it’s like I think that maybe we can never be like for sure certain that we know what the end result is in the way that he knew it.

But I think that we can if you would have a lot more courage to actually inquire, to actually trying to discover what we think.

Translation Movements and the Dialectical Path of Philosophy

The Problem with “Historical Reading” as Avoidance of Thought

Instructor: Part of this whole, let’s not think for ourselves, let’s not import our assumptions, let’s read the text historically as it was read then, a lot of this is also fear of thinking, interestingly. The whole Spinoza argument, you should read the Bible like you read nature, not import your assumptions. And okay, that’s part of a denial that reading the Bible is a way to do philosophy. But assume that there is a way. You can’t do that. Because you have to start from your own assumptions.

All of philosophy is starting from your own assumptions and breaking through them or discovering what you really thought, discovering what you really believed to begin with.

The Accessibility of Different Philosophical Traditions

Instructor: I do think, though, that there is a challenge of certain languages as being more and less accessible to us from the outside. Like, I always, in some sense, Aristotle is easier for me to, it’s maybe more dense, but it’s easier for me to read than even Plato. I sometimes think, like, in general, our education and whatever has a certain very specific Aristotelian quality that makes him more readable.

And Plato, I find, even though his writing style is maybe more entertaining, it’s harder to immerse myself in that kind of thought, like I think, I feel like that’s that, to do that unguided or to do that without someone at least transitioning me from my language to his, even if it’s in a small halfway step, sometimes feels like almost like inaccessible. And I think that if I would try to do that with Muslim books that I, if it’s not an issue with the technical translation, I maybe, those actually might be easier, but I can think—

Can you think of examples of maybe Indian philosophy that would be even less available than Plato or something like that?

Student: Right.

Translation Movements as the Real Work of Philosophy

All Jewish Thought as Translation Movement

Instructor: This is where I think that translation movements are supposed to do that work, like with Saskia before, that they don’t always do it well. Some extent they do, like some of them do it better than others, but like for example, for example, I somewhat think of all movements in so-called Jewish thought as translation movements, which might be… people are upset when I say this, like different people, because they think it’s denigrating them, like we don’t have original thoughts.

No, it’s the opposite. It’s because you have original thoughts that you have to do translation, meaning to say… When I say translation, I mean something like identifying certain philosophical terms, philosophical objects with Jewish terms, right? Something like in the Torah it says the word *ashrei* [אשרי: happiness/blessedness], or it says the word *toiv* [טוב: good], and that means what Aristotle means by happiness, the Greek term for that, or by the end, or the final end, or something like that.

Beyond One-to-One Correspondence

Instructor: And when you do these kind of translations, people think this is what people think. People generally think that people like Rambam [Maimonides] and Or de Zorf, or their kind of thoughts, are just doing a one-to-one translation, that they’re just taking these conclusions, like, oh, Aristotle said that separate thought is the best thing, oh that must be what *Chachma* [חכמה: wisdom] means in *Tanakh* [תנ״ך: the Hebrew Bible] or something. That’s not what he’s doing, or maybe if it is then it’s not interesting.

I think the more interesting thing that he’s doing, I think the first part of the *Guide* [Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed] is really about doing this or he’s trying to be able to do this, it’s probably very hard to do this, but the more interesting thing that they’re doing is trying to re-derive the dialectic in Hebrew or in Jewish, I don’t know if Hebrew is the correct word.

Re-Deriving the Dialectical Path

Instructor: The result of the value of separate thought would probably have an entirely different dialectic path, right? It would be the same but it, you do need to make it mean what the simple meaning is, like we have a simple meaning like everyone wants to be happy in a simple way. In Jewish it’s called something different than Greek. You might, it might not be called happiness, it might be called something like I don’t know, everyone wants to be *over ha-shem* [עובד ה׳: servant of God], you understand? It’s not *sham* [שם: name] and *lekud* [?], you have to start there because that’s what everyone believes. It’s supposed to be exotic and somehow make sense to them, not to me because I’m too complicated, but to most people make sense.

So you got to start from there and then, then I’m [Maimonides] did things like this, right? And then you have to somehow get to the idea that *over ha-shem* is equivalent to, or in other words, what you’re really looking for when you’re looking for *over ha-shem* is the same kind of thing that Aristotle would call human perfection, right? The completeness of the human being.

Why? Well, I can give you the dialectic for this if you really want, but point is it’s gonna take too long. And the point is you have to do it in this way because if you just start with the conclusions then you don’t believe that, they don’t understand that, then you didn’t do the maturation work. Because we start off with simple thoughts, with like commonplace thoughts, and we refine them into philosophical thoughts.

The Necessity of Speaking in Your Own Language

Instructor: And if you’re going to do it now, this is where I think that it’s important to speak, that’s where I said it’s important to speak in your language and it’s important to have translation movements that translate the whole, the whole dialectic, which then turns into something else. Like it’s not the same thing, the code of the process being different, because of it working through different paths, better or worse, you know, I guess some can be harder, some can be easier, better or worse. I have to talk about why it can be better or worse.

But we would have to do that in order to be philosophers, and not just people that believe whatever the philosophers say you should believe, which for that price, you could just be whatever you were before. There’s no use. There’s not really a use in that. Well, there’s slight use in that, but not as interesting.

Limitations on Philosophical Content Through Translation

Student: I mean, this is also, in some sense, puts a lot of limitation on, not necessarily, again, the philosophical result, but the philosophical content that’s available through translation. Meaning, I think sometimes, I don’t have any good examples offhand, but there are some distinctions that are maybe readily available to us that this person’s going through a fair bit of dialectic to make clear.

Instructor: Maybe. I think ideally the content should be the same but not necessarily should be recognizable. Meaning are there some, let’s say we’ll call it philosophical or maybe not deeply philosophical but at least dialectical stages, maybe philosophically valuable dialectical stages that some languages start off having and some don’t, with some variety obviously, obviously, you know, with some being a little bit better at this and some maybe tending…

I think in this sense, maybe we could say that some languages are better than others in the sense that they maybe have… they’re a little bit more… you end up a little more dialectically initiated towards certain philosophical concepts than others.

Student: Yeah, it seems like the answer should be yes.

Instructor: It seems like the answer should be yes.

Cultural Comparison at the Pre-Philosophical Level

Where Cultures Should Be Compared

Instructor: In other words, the comparison between cultures should be probably made at this level for the pre-philosophical people, the pre-philosophical stage. And I think that this is like the claim of anyone that claims something like the *Torah* [תורה: the Jewish Bible/Law] is the best thing. The claim that they’re making is something like, because if they’re making the claim the *Torah* is the philosophical truth, that claim is impossible because the philosophical truth is not something that can be given. The *Torah* is something that’s given. And you can’t be given being a philosopher.

So, anyone that’s a philosopher that makes that claim, it’s illogical. I think that the claim that’s being made in these kind of instances is precisely that the *Torah* was given by a philosopher king, and these are the correct opinions to have in order that some of you should be able to be philosophers, right? Like Al-Farabi’s book, *The Opinions of the People of the Perfect City*.

The Purpose of Cultural Habituation

Instructor: And this should mean that, I don’t know if it’s, it should mean that, and of course when we say the best we don’t mean just worth, it means all the practices of the culture. Something like philosophy is about ultimately discovering the one good that’s the good for everything or the one cause that’s the cause for everything. The first philosophy is about that. And some cultures do a better job of habituating people to orienting to having a unified life.

And some, like this is the right, this is the *Republic*’s [Plato’s Republic] argument that we should have, we should give, make childhood education geared towards that. Although most children won’t understand it but we should, you know, we shouldn’t show them films that make their life less unified. I’m repeating [Allan] Bloom’s interpretation of the *Republic* but anyways, right? We should, we should give people good ethics as children so that they should be more prepared or closer to philosophy.

I think there’s such an argument. I think that that’s the argument that anyone makes for a good culture versus a bad one is making.

The Primacy of Thinking Over Cultural Differences

Student: I wonder, like, I’m really curious how true this argument is because of how, like, the difference between yes thinking and not thinking is bigger than all these differences. Does that make sense?

Instructor: No.

Student: Like, yeah?

Instructor: No, and I think this is overestimated in the sense that if you see people who have any sort of philosophical inclination of any kind, it doesn’t take that much language to overcome a conceptual barrier.

Student: Right, because philosophy is supposed to be precisely the tools for breaking this problem.

Instructor: Yeah, you invent words, you get creative with your application of words, you apply it in unconventional ways to illustrate a certain unique aspect of something.

Student: Right, it seems hard to claim that, but for some value of most people being closer or something like that, that might be true.

Closing Affirmation

Instructor: I do think, like, so I can’t complain because I do think that this is where the *Torah* is the original, right? I do think that we have inherited…

Philosophy, Culture, and the Challenge of Translation: On Coherent Worldviews and Cross-Cultural Understanding

The Value of Inherited Coherent Worldviews

Speaker A: Right, it seems hard to claim that, but for some value of most people being closer or something like that, that might be true. I do think, so I can’t complain, because I do think that this is where the third issue is, right? I do think that we have inherited a world of thought. We at least remember it well enough, some of us at least, remember well enough what it means to have a coherent worldview or what it means to have a coherent culture. Coherent, of course, means unified, right? Surrounding a certain one goal or one end or one cause. And that that is enough for us to be able to—it’s enough to at least act as a counterweight to that disjointed culture which the majority culture is.

And I guess it is harder for people from the majority—people, I don’t know if this is a different argument right. I think I feel sad for people that grew up only in one culture. I think they lack any real standpoint from where to be critical. It’s much harder to be critical.

The Advantage of Bicultural Formation

That’s a big mitzvah [מצוה: commandment/good deed] to grow up in two cultures from both sides, right? Both if you’re too close this way or that way. Is there an ideal culture? For me, that’s the way.

I think a lot of philosophy actually historically worked this way, right? You have a religion, but then you’re exposed to science or philosophy only, trying to reconcile things. That is the start—very classical since the times of, as the professor Wilson said, since the times of Philo [Philo of Alexandria, 1st century CE Jewish-Hellenistic philosopher]. This is how philosophy worked, and possibly since the times of Socrates, because Socrates also was brought up in religious culture, even though they denied it. He also was brought up in religious culture which didn’t philosophize. In some sense this might be the beginning point and that’s very valuable.

But are there cultures that are closer? Could we make this argument? I guess you could. I don’t know how valuable it is. I don’t know how much of a difference it makes relative to how hard the task is.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it’s often usually overstated how difficult it is to overcome. Like suppose there is a different dialectical path towards getting to the same concept. I think maybe a deeply applied reading, maybe a reading that we might not do on a Tuesday at 8pm but maybe on a Shabbos [שבת: Sabbath] afternoon we can, can usually overcome it I think with enough application.

Speaker A: Probably. Probably if you could do it once you could do it for everything. I wonder how true that is.

Speaker B: What do you mean?

The Necessity of Teachers and Cultural Translation

Speaker A: Meaning you need someone. Usually people learn from teachers. It’s someone that can take something that you already believe in and that is your starting point and move you from that to something better. I think that you need that. And, like I said, academic philosophy generally doesn’t do that. Sometimes analytical philosophy does a little bit of that. Learning old philosophy in academic way doesn’t—that’s not their job, they don’t do that. But there could be a work—one of my formulations of my goals for my philosophy classes is to do this, to just do a translation with modern examples or with Jewish examples even, which some of us believe, or some of us can take as a starting point at least.

Like it says the halacha [הלכה: Jewish law] like this, but what do you do with this thought, right? Now you have a contradiction, now you have to resolve it. And that’s a way to open, to start thinking about the thing that we’re thinking about instead of just mashing together the words, right? That’s what the mashing together words is supposed to get you to.

The Problem of Premature Technical Language

Speaker B: What I sometimes find, especially ultra-academic philosophy, sort of approximates a little bit of what we were talking about earlier with just translating the end result. But I find that sometimes it rushes to extract technical language from the ordinary language and the dialogical process that philosophical books have. So immediately, this is being read, okay, we’re going to call this platonic epistemology. And sometimes that, I think, is just the same mistake in a different version where the technical language sometimes isn’t even the result of any sort of dialectic. It’s just immediately approximated or pulled out of a book without—

Speaker A: Like translated too quickly.

Speaker B: Yeah, translated too quickly and probably bearing some assumptions in an urge to make a technical language. Because I think the academic shortcoming is the belief that philosophy ought to take place within technical language.

Speaker A: Right. Maybe it’s the result and maybe not even that. In other words, maybe the end result is just to talk like a normal human being, but know what you’re talking about. Maybe the final philosopher just says exactly the words that his culture uses, but knows how to use them.

The Rambam Model: Philosophy in Cultural Language

Because we remember we’re starting from a very optimistic starting point where everyone has somewhere where they can start. Maybe, to go back to the religious philosophy concept, maybe the Rambam [Maimonides] that does Mishneh Torah [Maimonides’ comprehensive code of Jewish law] in the pure Talmudic language is doing the right thing the philosopher is doing, just as one thing that he says in the right time and the right place because of his knowledge of what it is. And that’s all that we’re trying ever to do. But you would not recognize it from the outside.

That’s why I think that the result of two people from different cultures doing the same exact philosophy and knowing the same truth should not necessarily be recognizable, mutually recognizable to each other. Just like two people, just like any two languages.

Speaker B: Well, but not in a way that’s not able to be overcome, just in a way that an immediate—

Speaker A: Yeah, but it’s probably not worth the effort.

Speaker B: Right.

The Question of Which Books to Read

Speaker A: In other words, just like two people—this is a big question that I always had, if we should be making a list of books that are worth reading and not worth reading for Americans in 2026. But I don’t know, something about that strikes me as wrong.

Speaker B: Which books should we read?

Speaker A: Meaning the ones that can be more easily—the ones in which the linguistic differences, not linguistic—yeah, I don’t—I have the opposite list, which is the books that it’s worth to try to overcome the differences because of them having some authority in my culture or something. But I probably have more—I’d probably be able to understand the New Testament more than I’d be able to understand Bhagavad Gita probably.

Speaker B: Yeah, that’s why you shouldn’t read it because it’s dangerous.

Speaker A: For sure. Yeah, that’s why all the Jews are reading eastern stuff, because if they would do Christian stuff they would probably become Christians. But a Jubu [Jewish Buddhist] sounds better than a Jew Christ, just for Jesus. Although, it could work the same way. Buju or Jubu, I forgot how it’s called.

Speaker B: Jewish Buddhist.

Speaker A: Yeah.

The Lake Analogy: Same Reality, Different Names

My thought—just like two people can know the same mountain, the same river, and each language has a different word for it. Nothing changes about the mountain or the river, whatever the constructivist will tell you. The river does its thing, and the mountain does its thing. It doesn’t care if you call it Lake Ontario or Lake America, it’s the same lake.

This is why they complain it’s silly, it makes no difference what the map says. But ultimately two people living on two sides of the lake might lose the ability to communicate with each other because they call it different names and he says, “I’m going here” and he says, “I’m going there,” and we don’t know where to meet each other, which is sad. For human collaboration, it’s sad that language engages that way.

Translation as Cultural Bridging (and Sometimes Conquest)

Which is why you end up with a complaint saying that all translation projects are really cultural bridging projects, sometimes cultural monopolization or, you know, what do you call it? Conquest or—

Speaker B: Sometimes it’s conquest, sometimes it’s the conquestee, the conquered being—

Speaker A: Subjugation or—

Speaker B: Yeah, being submissive to the conqueror, sometimes the opposite.

Speaker A: But it’s mostly that because—I think that’s overstated, those kind of arguments, because I don’t think that every culture knows everything. There isn’t a reason to think that. There’s probably progress to be learned from others, always. And there might be some cultures that are a lot more advanced, and you should learn their language because it advances you. But you’re still going to have to do it in your language. In other words, you’re going to still have to translate.

I guess at some point you could just learn their language, which is another way of doing translation, because you’re going to translate your world into their language instead of translating the words. But you do—it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to recognize things.

Kabbalists as Unrecognized Philosophers

So people, you know, the fact that the Jewish philosophers don’t recognize the Jewish Kabbalah [קבלה: Jewish mystical tradition] as philosophy only means that the Kabbalists are doing good philosophy and they’re doing it themselves. They’re re-deriving it from the texts and by working with the text and the reality and, as the Maimonideans say, banging those things against each other. They actually end up creating technical terms and a language that works for them, but they don’t have to explain it to anyone.

And then there’s a real question to what effort should we go to try to understand what these people were doing.

The Maimonidean Pedagogical Advantage

I think that’s where my question for that question is—the reason to do it is because these people have been—I think that Maimonideans generally have done a much better job of at least teaching people their translations, not in the sense, in the re-derivation sense from Jewish to philosophical or to reality-ish, that they’re valuable figuring out, tracing their steps.

Kant on Examples: Aristotle vs. Plato on Accessibility

Speaker B: It’s funny though, sometimes I wonder—and maybe this is something that I would say in support of Aristotle or gently more in support of Aristotle than Plato—is about what Kant was saying about how examples are the death of philosophy in the sense that examples limit you even further into a specific cultural reference and a specific language.

I think that, again, only just comparing Aristotle and Plato with each other, Aristotle’s language does seem to invoke—Plato’s books are literally usually one large example. In some way, that’s harder to understand than when it graduates to maybe more abstract language where it suddenly becomes more accessible. We start finding more commonality between our abstractions and theirs and things like that.

Speaker A: I couldn’t say that. Even the ancient Platonists thought that Aristotle was in some ways a better teacher.

Philosophy, Culture, and the Metaphors We Live In: On Translation, Religion, and the Meaning of Rest

The Universal Excellence of Great Philosophers

Instructor: Obviously, it’s hard to read someone like Aristotle, or even people like Kant and so on, and not say, well, these people are once in a world unique at how good they are at what they’re doing. All the cultural chauvinism that you have, well, the Jewish language must be better, it doesn’t work if you really know what’s going on.

The Danger of Abandoning One’s Cultural Framework

But that doesn’t mean that a Jew should only do it in Greek. That’s what I’m saying. Because just doing Aristotle might lead—well, firstly you get alienated from your own culture, which is a kind of exile, which is not good. Again, unless you do it completely—like we did many classes here on assimilation. The problem with it is that it’s hard to do correctly. The main problem, and also because it’s not going to be doing philosophy at some point.

So you do want to translate it into—like in some—like of course to some extent all of Jewish thought is, like I said, translations of that. And the fact that they’re not recognizable—people always go and say, well yeah of course, Hasidism or Kabbalah, this and that, are just Aristotle or whatever. But they’re wrong. Because this is where they go away from Aristotle. I think most of those places, or many of those places, are at least where they’re wrong—at least some of them, I don’t know—are not necessarily wrong. They’re just getting there from a different angle. And that’s what they should be doing.

And the fact that an orthodox Aristotelian doesn’t recognize it, that’s fine. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Student: Yeah. He should just be reading Moses or whatever.

Instructor: He should be reading. And he should just be reading more books outside of his culture.

Student: Yeah, or he shouldn’t, but it’s not like we don’t have to.

The Necessary Difficulty of Cross-Cultural Philosophical Dialogue

Instructor: It shouldn’t be recognizable. Two people actually thinking should have a hard time talking to each other. This is the hardship that we have. Of course, I think it is important for the purposes of peace, and it’s important to figure out how to talk for the person’s understanding—like if there’s a value—like this is the whole question of translation—like if there’s a value in translating the Tanakh [the Hebrew Bible] to Greek, it’s more value for peace of the world and for understanding. And peace is of course great, great good, right.

Cultural Differences at the Level of Examples and Lived Experience

And then we end up with the example that you were referring to before about the Shabbos [Sabbath] or something. Like it’s also possible that some languages, some cultures, in their level of *pshat* [plain/surface meaning], like in their level of non-understanding, because of those cultures getting to their thoughts in different ways, might be better or worse, or at least different in the way that the culture looks, although the end truth is the same, although they don’t actually believe different things.

Like an example—I was just speaking against examples a second ago—an example of like something where two different cultures might have different appraisals of like a certain virtue or something, like as an initial pre—yeah, maybe because their examples are different. But examples are people where people live their life, yeah.

Student: You could be against it as the result for philosophy, but it’s still people live in examples. We don’t live in generalizations and universals.

Religion as Culture as Metaphor

Instructor: I think of the question of which religion to be as mostly a question of this. Religion means culture, right? I know that religions like to claim that they’re not a culture. There’s something more or less than that. But a religion is just a culture. And a culture is just a metaphor that you live in. There’s a book, *Metaphors We Live By* [by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson]. A religion is just a metaphor you live in. And the metaphor—it’s just a metaphor—but that’s still what you’re living.

The Case of Judaism and Christianity: Theological Proximity, Metaphorical Distance

So, I don’t know. I was reading Alan Brill’s whole book about Judaism and Christianity and how close and how far it is. He’s doing only theology, technically—in this way it’s closer, this way it’s further. He does say this, he’s not in denial of this. But in the end of the day, this whole discussion seems a little weird because that’s not the difference.

Like, if we can get into the whole finer points of the Trinity and all of that and say, okay, so the difference ends up being a little smaller because it’s only in this exact detail and not in like the bigger detail difference. The difference is still that the Jews and the Christians live in a different story or in a different metaphor. Their God is triune and ours is one. And we teach our children different professions of faith.

Well, if you ask a professor, he’ll tell you that they’re closer than they are. The Christians have this idea of sin and salvation. And the Jews have something very similar, which is sin and repentance. And what’s really different between salvation and repentance? It’s only some *sifkot* [details/nuances] and somewhere we fast Yom Kippur [Day of Atonement] for God to forgive us and they wait for Jesus to die on the cross. Okay. Or they didn’t wait. They didn’t—ready. But anyways.

And what is really different and so on? The difference is that your imagery, you’re living a different life. And the example level.

The Problem of Not Considering That the Other Side Might Be Right

Like, I don’t know that we need to even pretend to have different theologies. I mean, you might, yes, and you might not, but maybe there’s a Jew that’s convinced by the truth of that way of thinking of it. Like, that bothers me in all these books. Like, why doesn’t anyone worry about, maybe they’re right.

Maybe people do have them. Ah, the Jews don’t believe in original sin. Okay, have you met human beings? It seems to be a pretty reasonable theory that humans are tainted with original sin. Like, if you know humans, it’s very hard to go around saying, oh, Jews don’t believe in it. Okay, well, my neighbor seems to definitely believe in it. Like, he doesn’t believe in it, he just is it. Of course, me, no, I’m a good guy. Like, you get what I’m saying.

Cultures as Operating Systems: Different APIs to the Same Reality

But the answer is something like, that might be true, but there’s still a choice that the culture makes or that’s made on a cultural operating system level as to, like, what are the main functions to the human, what are the main API [Application Programming Interface] that we expose? Do we expose this original sin thing, and we’re like, this is where you press the button and you get out of it? Or we expose natural human fragility, what’s the big difference? I don’t know. And you’ve got to go to ask for forgiveness. Those are different buttons that you press.

You get to the same place, ultimately. One would hope that there was only one world and one—we say one God—and therefore everything is the same. But the difference is very big, and there might be a moral difference. There might be like, in the sense of like, since human life is lived at the level of these images, there might be a difference even if it’s not deterministic. It’s not like if you are a Christian you must therefore, I don’t know, inflict suffering on other human beings because suffering of Christ has caused the salvation of the world, so you believe in suffering. That’s not true. You obviously could be a Christian and still understand that it’s not good for suffering—our job is to alleviate suffering of people or something. But you’re still living in a different metaphor.

Extended Example: Shabbat and the Greek Valorization of Action

Or what we said was about Shabbos. Like people say—say, like all these kind of *drushas* [homiletical interpretations]. What would we be talking about? Just an example.

There is a debate, and it’s also—the other thing with all these debates is that you could find inside, internally, tradition, the debate. But the Greek culture has this valorization of action over passivity to an extreme extent, and some people say, therefore, the result of this is that their god, or Aristotle’s god at least, which is not really the Greek traditional god, but anyways, Aristotle’s god is fully in action, or said to be fully active, to have no passivity in him, or no potentiality.

And that is contrasted to the Jewish god who at least rests on every seventh day. Maybe not always, maybe for six days he works, but on the seventh day he rests, and that’s said to be the more sacred day. So our sanctity is bound up with rest and the Greek is bound up with action.

The Ancient Anti-Jewish Complaint About Laziness

And people say, this is supposed to explain the very ancient anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish complaint about the Jewish Shabbos, that the Jews are lazy people. We sanctify rest. We don’t even do games on our Shabbos. In a Greek festival, there’s stuff to do. You don’t just sit around. We do do a lot of sitting around and eating, but there’s also like stuff happening. And the Jewish Shabbos, which is supposedly the greatest Jewish festival—maybe it’s not a festival—like sacred day, is to do nothing. There’s some death in it, some passivity or some peace in it or some rest.

The Philosophical Deconstruction: Rest and Action as the Same State

And then I said this might be true. Like it’s obviously true that Jewish Shabbos is pretty—very passive day. It’s literally called Shabbos—like don’t rest—don’t do things. Yeah, maybe we could use a dosage of some action bias in our life. But that doesn’t mean that the theory is correct, right? Because if you actually start thinking of what the theory is and you say—like people actually say this but it’s total misunderstanding. But I’m saying it’s misunderstanding at the level of philosophy, not at the level of metaphor. Because people—you would think about like, well, what does Aristotle mean when he says God is fully in action or fully actual, right? It’s better translation.

And you say, well, it means that there’s no change in God, right? That’s really what it’s about. Because what we mean by work is change from potentiality to actuality. All change is from potentiality to actuality, and that’s what is painful. That is what is work. That’s what we call work. And God does everything, but without moving, without changing. So he is at rest.

Because another way of saying rest would be unchanging. And God is unchanging. So we might as well be fully at rest. It’s just a choice of which word to call it. We call this state fully at rest or fully in action.

And then someone could even go further and say that our ideal Shabbos is actually the fully active, unchanging one, rather than the lazy, passive one.

God’s Rest as Full Activity and the Philosophical Method Applied to Rosh Hashanah

God’s Unchanging Nature as Both Rest and Action

Instructor: And God does everything, but without moving, without changing. So he is at rest. Because another way of saying rest would be unchanging. And God is unchanging, so we might as well be fully at rest. It’s just a choice of which word to call it. Do we call this state fully at rest or fully in action?

The Ideal Shabbos as Full Activity

And then someone could even go further and say that our ideal Shabbos is actually the fully active unchanging one rather than the lazy passive one, because our point of Shabbos is not in reality unactualized or—yeah, right. So the point of Shabbos is come a lot closer. We’re supposed to live our life fully on Shabbos, not be a little more dead on Shabbos, at least according to the orthodox interpretation which has any Shabbos, which is literally eudaimonia, right? Shabbos is the most eudaimonic day of the week. It’s supposed to be because it’s supposed to not include any change from rest, from what you called yesterday rest, from potentiality to actuality, which is melacha [מלאכה: work/creative labor forbidden on Shabbos], changing and affecting a change.

But it’s not a passive day, it’s an active day. So if you think philosophically, you end up unifying things like this. But this doesn’t mean that Shabbos and whatever version of it, other cultures’ version of the ideal day, look the same. Like there might be a difference in image between these things.

Student: Oh, that part I don’t—

Instructor: You don’t know?

Student: Gosh.

Applying the Philosophical Method to Rosh Hashanah

Instructor: I’ll tell you. I have to figure out how to construct the dialectic from Rosh Hashanah [ראש השנה: the Jewish New Year]. Now we’ve been backwards, right? I have to impose the result of our conversation, yeah. So if you have to start from what Rosh Hashanah is, and then get to this, how to do things. So how would you do Rosh Hashanah?

Two Approaches: Comparative Religion vs. Philosophical Inquiry

Well, how you would do it is to notice the uniquely Rosh Hashanah or Jewish version of Rosh Hashanah kind of language or kind of metaphor. For example, there is a God that judges people and gives out their portions for the next year or something like that. Yeah, you can do a cross-cultural religious comparative religion study and find how many other cultures have similar beliefs and stuff. That would be one thing you could do to universalize it, like structuralize it. Or you could, which is not interesting, because it’s just showing you what other people think.

Or you could understand that the Jewish people are the ones that live in this language. But then you want to know what it means. You would be doing the same thing that the other guy that has his Rosh Hashanah on some other day of the year, and has his giving out the portions to people in a different way. Both would be asking, what does this mean?

The Philosophical Questions Embedded in Rosh Hashanah

And you would ask questions like philosophical way of talking about Rosh Hashanah, to be talking about:

– Fate and predestination

– To what extent human actions define what they’re doing

– To what extent does your past influence your future—those are the questions of teshuva [תשובה: repentance/return]

– Those are the questions of getting better

– To what extent is the world just? Maybe that’s a question. Things like that.

Working Within the Jewish Language

But if you’re Jewish, you would have to do it in saying, okay, what does it mean? And you maybe try to understand the association between, yeah, maybe renewal and repentance as being somewhat interconnected, like what you’re saying about the continuity of past and future.

But that’s what I would say. You would start it, you would say the drusha [דרשה: religious discourse/sermon], and I’m always worried to do it too much because then people don’t realize that I’m talking about something real. But you would start the drusha by saying, what is the drusha? What’s the shaychus [שייכות: connection/relevance] between being at the beginning of the year and doing teshuva or something like that? But that’s not a real question. I’m like, I don’t know, that’s what they say.

What you should really be doing is trying to think about that. What does it mean for the year to have a head or a beginning? I think it’s enough if you do that and figure out at least one way to get to that that means this. Or the opposite. That’s how you would do it. But anyways. That is basically what you would do.

The Metaphor of Divine Writing

Instructor: So do you know already how to do this?

Student: Jenna, that’s how—well last year I hope it is now you could save them.

Instructor: Why would God write things? What do you think writing is? Doesn’t God remember everything? Why do you have to write it down?

Student: Oh, it’s a—

Instructor: Okay, does—was that helping me? What does the mug hold for? That’s a story, we gotta stop now.

Closing Reflection: Levels of Finality in Human Action

Student: Yeah, I mean, I do like the idea of maybe like, I think human action, if we don’t give it any sort of context or any sort of formalization, it can be very, it loses a lot of its definition. And yeah, but you also can’t write things down and seal it right away. At least 10 days to let the ink dry and make sure that it really looks—

Instructor: Yeah, yeah. Edit it a little bit. Install the mailman example and the Zeiss Hanukkah [זייס חנוכה: possibly referring to a metaphor about Hanukkah] being the post office.

Student: Alright.

Instructor: I think we need some sort of—we need all these things like these different levels of finality to our actions to both have some sense of responsibility but also ability to make change.

Student: Yeah.