The Izbicer Rebbe and Freewill

Having spent some time thinking about medieval approaches to the freewill problem – the apparent contradiction between God’s foreknowledge and our freedom – Rabbi Herzl Hefter introduced me to the work of the Chassidic Rebbe, R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner, otherwise known as the Izbicer. In this blog, I want to present what I take to be the Izbicer’s ‘solution’ to the free will problem. All of this has been worked out for me, essentially, by R. Hefter. The only contribution I’ve made, if any, is to repackage the central ideas utilising a collection of philosophical tools that I borrow from Gareth Evans and Kendal Walton.[1]

Our talk about fiction requires careful semantic analysis. There is a sense in which it is false to say that ‘Hamlet is a prince of Denmark’, because Hamlet doesn’t exist. You can’t be a prince of Denmark if you don’t exist. On the other hand, I have surely made a more serious error if I have said that ‘Hamlet is an Italian ice-cream salesman’. The first comment, though strictly speaking false, would win the approval of my English literature teacher. The second comment would reveal that I hadn’t been reading my Shakespeare.

Evans, following the lead of Walton, helps us to navigate through this sort of minefield. He suggests that when we engage with a fiction, we relativise the truth conditions of what we say to the fiction in question. So, though it is false that Hamlet is a prince of Denmark, it is true relative to the fiction at hand. That Hamlet is an Italian ice-cream salesman, on the other hand, is false relative to the real world and relative to the fiction. The meaning of the words ‘Hamlet is a Danish prince’ remain constant; but the truth of the claim can be asserted as relative to the real world (in which case, it’s false), or relative to the fiction (in which case, it’s true).

The account becomes more complex when we recognize that there can be fictions within a fiction. Famously, Hamlet contains a play within a play. Let us call the actor who plays the king in the play within the play, Adam. If I say that ‘Adam is a king,’ I say something false, because Adam doesn’t exist, and you can’t be a king if you don’t exist. Even relative to Shakespeare’s fiction, I have said something false, because Adam isn’t a King, he’s an actor. But, relative to the fiction within the fiction, I have said something true. Theoretically, there is no limit to the number of times we can iterate this maneuver. There can be fictions within fictions within fictions.

My grandfather used to tell me a jocular story that plays with this very notion: ‘One dark stormy night, the sailor said to the captain, ‘tell us a story,’ and this is how it went: ‘One dark stormy night, the sailor said to the captain, ‘tell us a story,’ and this is how it went: ‘One dark stormy night, the sailor said to the captain, ‘tell us a story,’ and this is how it went:…’’’’ The reader of such a story is introduced to a number of fictional worlds: worlds within worlds within worlds. The meaning of the words doesn’t shift upon each iteration, but the fictions to which the truth-conditions need to be relativised do keep shifting.

Returning to the notion of free will, let us examine the following statement: Hamlet didn’t freely decide to challenge his uncle; rather, Shakespeare decided to write the story that way. If we’re speaking relative to the fiction itself, this statement is false. The whole notion of drama depends upon the dramatically charged choices that the protagonists have to agonize over. You know that it’s just a play, as you’re watching it, but you recognize that, relative to that play, the choices are real and free. On the other hand, the statement is true, relative to a different discourse entirely.

If we’re speaking about the fiction, rather than relative to it, then it is of course true that the entire plot depends upon the decisions that the author makes. In that sense, Hamlet’s whole life plan is entirely dependent upon Shakespeare’s choices. We have thus recognized, at least with regard to Hamlet, that he is free, relative to one discussion, and yet wholly dependent upon Shakespeare, relative to another discussion.

The Izbicer adopts what we would call a Berklean metaphysics (after George Berkeley). For the Izbicer, something exists because it exists in the mind of God. In a sense, to be real is to be imagined by God.[2] A similar thing could be said about existence in the world of Hamlet. To exist in Hamlet’s world is to be imagined by Shakespeare to exist in Hamlet’s world. To be real in the play within the play is to be imagined by the playwright that exists in the play, who, in turn, only exists because Shakespeare imagines him. When we say that Hamlet acts of his own free will, we say something true relative to the fiction because Shakespeare imagines Hamlet to be free. Likewise, according to the Izbicer, God imagines us to be free, and that’s what it means for us to be free. Our freedom couldn’t be more real. It’s as real as anything else, because, to be real is to be imagined by God. So, the Izbicer wasn’t the enemy of free will that he’s traditionally painted to be. He thought that we do have free will, because God, so to speak, imagines us that way.

 

One might feel a certain disappointment when faced with this approach to free will. We’re not really free if our whole lives have been authored by God in the way that Hamlet’s life was authored by Shakespeare; that’s not the sort of freedom that we were after! But that critique plays insufficient attention to the semantic shift that we employ when we move between speaking relative to a fiction and speaking about a fiction. When we speak relative to a fiction, it is true to say that the characters are free, and the meaning of the word ‘free’ doesn’t have to be contorted in the slightest; the concept of freedom is the same concept that we started with. But, when we speak about the fiction, and its writer, we make a semantic ascent, and it is no longer true to talk of the characters as having any sort of independence from the author. But, the freedom that we attribute to the characters, in their world, is a real as anything can be, and it is freedom in precisely the pre-philosophical sense of the word; no definitions have been twisted.

The Izbicer seems highly sensitive to the fact that it may not be possible for us to talk meaningfully about any sort of reality beyond the world we live in, and the fictions (and the fictions within fictions) that we create. The meaning of our words draw upon our experience to such an extent that, even if we were brains in vats, we wouldn’t be able to say, with any meaning, that we are brains in vats because our referential capabilities don’t allow us to reach out of our experiential realm to talk about some sort
of vat that exists beyond the horizon of our experience. We might think that we’re talking meaningfully, when we talk about the world that lies beyond the horizons of human experience, but, perhaps we’re under some sort of delusion. Perhaps our words don’t have the power to reach out that far. Thus, even if God is the author of reality, in some way comparable to Shakespeare’s authorship of Hamlet, there is a sense in which we couldn’t really talk meaningfully about it. So, a lot of this blog, has actually been nonsense, as it’s tried to talk about worlds above our own, so to speak. But, the hope is that, as with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the nonsense is, somehow, illuminating.

Accordingly, the Izbicer was keen on the notion that fundamental truths about God couldn’t be expressed meaningfully in the language of thought; that they could only be apprehended by the heart in the midst of some sort of fleeting mystical insight. This is what led to the Izbicer’s disregard for systematic philosophy: it can never reach out to the God that lives beyond the power of description.[3]

What the Izbicer demonstrates is that it is possible for agents to be free, relative to the fiction that they live in, whilst wholly determined from a God’s eye view. On the other hand, the Izbicer admits that we can’t actually break out of our perspective to see the sense in which we are determined. Nevertheless, he holds that we sometimes get some sort of mystical glimpse; akin to the Wittgensteinian idea of having something shown to you that can’t be said. The sense in which we are free is very real and open to human comprehension. The sense in which we are determined is somewhat closed to us, just as it is closed, so to speak, to Hamlet. But, in order to illustrate this notion of a mystical glimpse, let me share an example that the Izbicer uses himself.[4]

When a man and a woman come together in a loving embrace, we are very aware of the contingency of the event. The couple didn’t have to be in the appropriate mood. And, if the event results in the conception of a new human life, we are all too aware of the fact that the relevant biological happenings are fraught with contingency. All too often, couples try to conceive and fail. And yet, when one is confronted, for the first time, with one’s own new born baby, despite the knowledge that the event that led to its conception was overtly contingent, one is struck by what one could call the unbearable heaviness of being.[5] This baby simply had to be. Everything about its existence is so right and perfect. The experience I’m describing is somewhat mystical. We know it doesn’t make sense, but it seems, to the person who experiences it, to transcend sense. That is what it means for a character in the story that God is spinning to catch a glimpse of the necessity that is false relative to his own existence, and yet true from some higher, incommunicable perspective.

For the Izbicer, human freedom is real. It’s as real as anything can be. On the other hand, there is a sense, that we can’t fully grasp, in which our existence, and our every action, is dependent upon the will of God. For that reason, the Izbicer is willing, in certain moods, to twist the famous Talmudic dictum radically, until it reads: ‘All is in the hands of heaven, even the fear of heaven.’ But this didn’t mean that, in the Izbicer’s opinion, we didn’t have free will. He was trying to make a semantic ascent.

One might not like the Berklean metaphysics of the Izbicer, including the notion that reality is defined merely in terms of being imagined by God. One might also think that the Izbicer’s worldview fails to get God off the hook, to any degree, for the existence of evil. We are all, for better or worse, merely characters in a story that God seems to be telling to himself; he writes the happy parts, but he also writes the tragic parts. This is a failing that the Izbicer seems to share with Crescas. We might also react negatively to his mystical notion of apprehending that which cannot be understood.

But, one cannot fault the Izbicer for failing to save either human freedom or divine omniscience. Freedom is a notion that can appear meaningfully in a fiction, or in a fiction within a fiction, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. The freedom of any of the characters along the way, relative to the fiction at hand, is as real as anything else. And you can’t say that the Izbicer’s conception of life itself isn’t real, because, for him, reality is defined, along with Berkeley (who had somewhat respectable philosophical reasons for so defining reality), by having been imagined into existence by God. The difference between Hamlet’s world, that doesn’t really exist, and our world, that does, is that Hamlet’s was imagined by a human being, ours was imagined by God, whose imaginings constitute reality.

Finally, you might think that the Izbicer has failed to give God and his creation the requisite degree of separation. The centrality of the notion of tzimtzum seems to be ignored by a worldview that relates to the whole world as a dream in the Divine mind. Doesn’t the Izbiver collapse the possibility for a meaning relationship with God, because he collapses the difference between us and Him? On the other hand, the Izbicer could reply: the creation is distinct from the creator because the creator imagines it that way. This sounds like a cheat, but it is no more of a cheat than the way in which the Izbicer secures our freedom. It all follows from the idea that reality itself is defined in terms of the Divine imagination. If we are imagined to be distinct from God, then, relative to the world in which we live, we are distinct from God, even if there is some God’s eye perspective from which this distinction evaporates.

We might have plenty of reasons for disliking it, personally, it’s currently not my preferred solution to the problem, but the Izbicer has achieved something that eluded the medieval Jewish philosophers: (1) He doesn’t hold his hands up in the air and claim that the human mind can’t reconcile the truth that God is omniscient, with the truth that we are free, as Maimonides seems to do – for we can certainly understand how Hamlet can be free and yet determined; nor does he twist and massage the concept of God’s omniscience until it allows for God to be ignorant of the future, as does Gersonides; nor does he twist and massage the concept of freedom, in order to make it compatible with the fact that our futures are determined, as does Crescas. He might not have thought of himself as a philosopher, but it seems as if the Izbicer made a significant contribution to the problem of freewill.

PS – The Izbicer’s solution almost seems to fall out of a Berkelian metaphysics, does anyone know if Berkeley ever tackled the problem? Was his solution similar?

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[1] Evans, G., The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, §§10.2-10.4; and Walton, K., ‘Pictures and Make-Believe,’ Philosophical Review, 1973, vol. 82, pp. 283-319, and his ‘Fearing Fictions,’ Journal of Philosophy, 1978, vol. 75, pp. 5-27.
[2] Cf. Mei Hashiloach in parshat Miketz.
[3] See section VI of R. Hefter’s as yet unpublished article on the Determinism of R. Mordechai Leiner - in that paper, the reading that I present of the Izbicer's worldview is very well butrussed in the relevant texts.
[4] See his comments on Leviticus 12:2, in volume 1 of the Mei Hashiloach.
[5] I owe this turn of phrase to R. Hefter.