Judaism and Philosophical Speculation

I was recently asked to write an article of philosophical interest for a Jewish publication. The content is aimed at the lay-person, but perhaps people here will find it interesting. I'd be grateful, as ever, for your comments.

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As a modern orthodox Jew, I am keenly aware of the value and weight that we place upon secular studies and rational inquiry. This emphasis is one of the key features that distinguishes our community from other varieties of orthodoxy. For that reason, we must be certain to pay attention to a certain Mishna, the first Mishna in the second chapter of tractate Haggiga. As we’ll see, it looks like a Mishna that’s specifically aimed at forbidding the study of philosophy and limiting our freedom of thought.

In many senses, Saadya Gaon was the first Jewish philosopher. Of course, earlier rabbinic thinkers espoused their own, and very profound philosophies. But, in the technical sense in which the word is often used today, to be a ‘philosopher’ demands intimate knowledge of the western intellectual tradition from Parmenides onwards. The rabbis of the Talmud may have been profound thinkers; they may even have had some exposure to Greek thought, but they certainly didn’t have the sort of intimate knowledge of the Greek traditions, and training in its methods, to be called ‘philosophers’ in this technical sense. Before Saadya Gaon came Philo. Philo was a Jew who was totally at home with the international intellectual trends of his time. But he, like later Karaite thinkers, didn’t stand within the rabbinic tradition of the Oral Torah. Thus Saadya Gaon was the first: the first proponent of rabbinic Judaism to couple mastery of Torah with mastery of secular studies.

In the introduction to his major philosophical treatise, Sefer Emunot Vadeot, Saadya Gaon imagines someone opposed to the whole venture of writing a systematic Jewish philosophy utilising secular sciences to demonstrate the truth of Judaism. He envisages the following words attacking his whole project: ‘How can we undertake to pursue knowledge by means of speculation and inquiry with the object of attaining mathematical certainly seeing that our people reject this manner of speculation as leading to unbelief and the adoption of heretical views?’ In short: philosophers always end up becoming heretics; so, it’s better not to engage in inquiry at all. Saadya Gaon’s answer is somewhat surprising in terms of how blunt he’s willing to be. He basically says, in response to this criticism: stop being stupid! There are all sorts of stupid beliefs out there. Saadya Gaon goes to the trouble of listing some of them: some of his neighbours in Babylon thought that whoever goes to India becomes rich; some Jews, in his period, thought that lunar eclipses happen when something resembling a whale swallows the moon; he had heard that some Arabs believed that if a camel wasn’t slaughtered over your grave then you’d have to appear on foot on Judgement Day. The belief that philosophy is inherently bad is just another belief to add to the list of stupid things that people think. But, what about the Mishna in Haggiga? You can’t say that a Mishna is stupid, God forbid.

The Mishna in question states: ‘Whoever speculates on one of four things should better not have been created: what is above; what is below; what is before; and what is after.’ Saadya Gaon realises that these sound like philosophical questions; he realises that the Mishna seems to be forbidding unrestricted philosophical speculation; and, he isn’t about to call the Mishna stupid. Indeed, he takes the challenge of this Mishna very seriously. This is how he responds: he accepts that on the surface, this Mishna seems to be limiting or even forbidding philosophical speculation; but, he says that we’re licenced to reinterpret their words on the basis that they simply couldn’t have been banning, or even limiting, philosophy; to do so would have been to place a limitation on a key Jewish value; it would have run counter to numerous Biblical injunctions; and thus, however much the Mishna seems to be placing limits upon philosophy, this simply cannot be what was meant. Despite any appearances to the contrary, this Mishna has to be interpreted so as to allow the Jewish philosopher complete freedom to philosophise.

Two questions now emerge: from where does Saadya Gaon derive the Jewish obligation to philosophise; and, how can he re-read our Mishna to be philosophy-friendly?

Answering our questions in turn, Saadya Gaon first provides us with a list of scriptural sources that is supposed to make it obvious that philosophising is an important religious virtue. Indeed, God is quoted, by Isaiah as having said, ‘Know ye not? Hear ye not? Hath it not been told you from the beginning? Have ye not understood the foundations of the earth?’ (Isa. 40:20). It’s as if we’re being blamed for not having engaged in precisely the sort of philosophical speculation that the Mishna seemingly forbids. Quoting from the book of Job, Saadya Gaon points out how, in that book, unlimited philosophical speculation seems to be the favourite past time of its pious characters: Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zopher and Elihu; saying to each other, ‘Let us choose for us that which is right; let us know among ourselves what is good’ (Job 34:4). We could add to this list of sources the fact that Judaism includes a variety of cognitive commandments: we have to know that God exists (Mishne Torah, Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 1:1), we have to know that there is none other than him (Deut. 4:39). How can you transform mere belief into knowledge without subjecting that belief to the sort of scrutiny that comes with philosophising? How can you transform mere belief into knowledge without subjecting that belief to the full interrogation of every secular science you have to hand? A full Jewish life is impossible, Saadya Gaon would argue, unless you’re willing to embrace rational inquiry and to embrace wisdom from whichever mouth it’s uttered, and from whomever’s pen it’s written.

It’s clear: the Mishna simply couldn’t have sought to place limitations on philosophical speculation. To do so would be to uproot a central Torah value. We simply have to search for another interpretation of the Mishna. This is what Saadya Gaon suggests: despite appearances to the contrary the Mishna doesn’t have a problem with any particular question that might be asked in the process of philosophical speculation (we know that that simply can’t be the right reading); the Mishna instead must only have a problem with these sorts of questions when they’re asked with the wrong attitude.

Why are you engaging in philosophy? Is it to find out the truth? Well, if that’s the case, then there’s something wrong. We already know the truth. It has been faithfully handed down to us from generation to generation; a great chain of trustworthy transmission stretching back to our ancestors who received this truth at Mount Sinai. To engage in speculation to find out how we should live, what the meaning of life is, how and why the world was created, is, essentially, to reject your faith in the Torah. We know the answers to these questions already. And, if we don’t know them, then, at least, we know where to look: the Torah. What the Mishna must be forbidding is the attempt to build a philosophy from scratch; the attempt to bypass the Torah and find out for yourself, the answer to all of your deepest questions.

But sometimes, even if we know the truth, we might still want to work out for ourselves what makes it true; how it’s true. Let me modernise an example brought by Saadya Gaon himself in order to illustrate this point. Imagine you type a long and complicated sum into your calculater; the calculator informs you that the sum equals 500. Given that your calculator is remarkably reliable, and in fact, the answer is correct, your new belief that such-and-such a sum adds up to 500, can safely be called knowledge. You know that it equals 500. Your calculator has told you so. But, if you’re anything like me, you might still want to work how it is true. You might still want to run the sum through in your head, for yourself.  If you’re engaging in philosophy in order to find out the truth, as if you didn’t already know it, or at least as if you didn't know that it’s already waiting to be found in the Torah, then you’re philosophising with the wrong attitude. It is you who the Mishna condems. But, if you’re engaging in philosophy, in the full knowledge that the truth has already been revealed to us; if you’re merely trying to figure out what that truth is and how it is that it’s true, then you’re doing a very commendable thing; you’re living up to a key Torah value, and you’re surely not hampered in any way by the Mishna in question. As Saadya Gaon says, ‘In this way we speculate and search in order that we may make our own what our Lord has taught us by way of instruction.’

There is another way to read the Mishna in question that saves philosophical speculation and perhaps does less violence to the text. The Mishna certainly seems to be condemning certain questions. Saadya Gaon has to uproot this appearance and suggest that the Mishna is only condemning the attitude that often accompanies such questions. But, here’s another reading. Contra Saadya Gaon, the Mishna is condemning certain questions, just as it seems to be doing. But, it isn’t condemning philosophical speculation. In fact, the questions that the Mishna mentions really don’t have any place in a rigorous philosophical analysis of life. Let us remind ourselves, what are the four black-listed questions? ‘What is above; what is below; what was before; what will be after?’ These questions must have been abbreviated, because, as they stand, they don’t make any sense. If you ask me, ‘What is above?’ I might well respond, ‘above what?’ And, if you ask me, ‘What was before?’ I might well respond, ‘before what?’ Filling these questions in, in order to make them the sort of philosophical questions that we’re most probably talking about, we arrive at the following list:

1.       What was before time/God?

2.       What will be after time/God?

3.       What is above space?

4.       What is below space?

These sound like profound questions. But let’s investigate further. It turns out that these questions don’t really deserve to be called questions at all. They look like questions: they start with the word ‘What’ and end with a question-mark, and yet, they don’t really make any sense at all. The notion of being above something is a spatial notion. You can only sensibly ask whether x is above y if both x and y are spatially located entities. I can ask whether the book is above the table because both the book and the table are spatially located. My question merely seeks to clarify what their actual locations are relative to each other on a vertical axis. But I can’t sensibly ask whether the colour green is above the number five. Neither the colour green nor the number five are the sort of things that are located in space, so to ask about their relative locations is to descend into stupidity. In order to be above something, or, indeed, to be below something, you need to be in space. To ask what is above space itself makes no sense because only things that are inside space can be above anything. The whole question collapses under its own absurdity.

Similarly, the notion of being before something is a temporal notion. You can only sensibly ask whether event x is before y if both x and y are in time. I can ask whether the Gulf war was before the Second World War because both events took place in time. My question merely seeks to clarify their temporal ordering. But, once again, I can’t sensibly ask whether the colour green is before the number five. Neither the colour green nor the number five are the sort of things that occur in time, so to ask about their temporal ordering is to descend into stupidity. In order to be before something, or, indeed, to be after something, you need to be in time. To ask what is before time itself makes no sense, because only things that are inside time can be before anything Likewise, to ask what is before or after God, is to make no sense because God is outside of time. Like the colour green and the number five, He is not the sort of thing that stands in temporal relations to anything else.

The problem that this Mishna has with its four questions is that the questions are actually absurd. They might look to be profound upon first glance. The naïve child might think he’s stumbled upon a great question when he asks, ‘Who was before God? Who created God?’ But God isn’t in time. The question makes no sense. These four questions are not real philosophical speculation. In fact, they are a distraction from real philosophical speculation. The questions are absurd. The Mishna says of people who ask such questions that they ‘should better not have been created.’ The phrase in Hebrew reads: רתוי לו כאילו לא בא לעולם. Perhaps we could offer a more literal translation: For anyone who asks one or more of these four questions, ‘it would be fitting for them not to come into the world.’ Why? You think that you’re asking questions in order to discover things about the world. You think you’re being profound, but your questions really aren’t questions. They look like questions. They feel like questions. But, they’re absurd. It’s as if you’re not really in the world at all. Locked up in your ivory tower, you’re spending your days thinking about questions that couldn’t possibly have any answers. They couldn’t possibly have any answers because the questions don’t actually make sense. Philosophical speculation is well and good. But, the philosopher ultimately wants to get to know reality. If you stumble on to one these four questions, you’ll never get to know reality because you’ve been deceived into thinking that you’ve got a question when you don’t!

On my reading, the Mishna in Haggiga is warning us against deceptive strings of words; strings of words that look like questions but don’t really ask anything at all. This is an important thing to be warned against. Even when a question isn’t absurd, it might not deserve an answer. Imagine a child in a physics class pointing to a diagram of two atoms. The child asks, ‘why is that electron over there, orbiting the atom on the left when it could have been orbiting the atom on the right?’ How should the teacher respond? Should she respond at all?  The only good answer is, ‘Because God willed it that way; now be quiet!’ This appeal to Divinity needn’t be read in a cynical tone. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his great early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [6.372], writes: ‘[P]eople today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages . . . both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.’

Wittgenstein’s point is this: there is something appropriate about appealing to the Divine will, if what you intend to do is to signal a terminus to the possibility of further investigation. No process of explanation can go on for ever. Eventually you’re going to have to stop. Just like you can’t define every word and concept without circularity, because you’ll have to use words and concepts to define each other; so too is it the case that you can’t expect to explain everything. One of the key lessons that a philosopher has to learn is when to stop.

Our investigation can finish with the following observations. Judaism certainly values philosophical speculation. No Mishna can ever undermine that fact. But, we have to be wary. We have to make sure that we’re philosophising with the right attitude. We have to make sure that our questions really are questions. And, we have to be humble enough to know that at some point, our explanations have to stop. Ultimately, the world is the way that it is because God made it that way.