Rav Chaim
Lifshitz
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ESCAPING THE SYSTEM
(Part I)
Any factor that binds
people in common, meaning that it collects and groups
them according to like characteristics and classifies them into like
categories, will also be the factor that divides them, by separating
them according to the differences that distinguish one group from
another.
This dividing into categories does not address human qualities.
It focuses rather on the quantitative mechanism that belongs to a
systemized view of
creation. In this view, the created universe is built of a system of
components within a larger system comprised of mechanical laws that
operate and activate the created universe. There is no doubt that the
human race as well is a part of this system. It is no exception to it,
and
it does not deviate from it.
Being a system as well, the individual human being is subject to and
subjugated by mechanical laws. Thus heredity is a system that
determines individual tendencies of physical behavior, of diseases, of
capabilities that operate and activate the physical system and its
physical movements. This includes the speed and efficiency of the
muscular
system, the level of sensitivity in speed of response and in overall
coordination, and even the capacity for absorption of data, for memory,
and for all mental activity, which too belong to a mechanical system
that has been extensively investigated by Piaget and his fellow
students of cognitive development, among whom I was included, having
had the privilege of being involved with Piaget, and of knowing the
great
scientist at close hand.
During one of the seminars, in which we were given the opportunity to
discuss directly with Piaget any issues relating to the activity of
intelligence, I posed a question that left the master speechless:
According to Piagetian theory, cognition reaches maturity during the
middle of adolescence, at approximately age 14-15, the age at which the
adolescent is capable of activating abstract thought and operating at
the abstract level of cognition. To my question, what happens after
this age, Piaget replied that there is no new level of cognition, but
only mechanical/quantitative improvement, such as increased speed of
absorption and output, and improved proficiency in activating the
cognitive process.
What of the quality of cognition, I persisted. What do you mean by the
quality of cognition, Piaget inquired. I mean by it originality,
creativity, intuition, creative imagination, discerning subtleties, in
short all qualitative activity that bursts the technical confines of
one's own accumulated personal experience. I mean the writer who is
capable of creating new situations that do not derive from his own
personal or collective experience. I mean the creative artist who sees
ahead of his time, to the point of prophesying future processes of
human behavior that could in no way have been predicted, as well as
their repercussions, fraught with social and political implications. I
mean the literary artist whose probing insight into psychological
conditions is so profound that no psychologist could have comprehended
them or predicted them through the scientific tools at his disposal.
Thus Flaubert, in his Madame Bovary, was capable of understanding the
complex and intricate workings of a woman's heart despite his total
lack of experience with women and despite the rare level of disinterest
in the feminine sex that characterized this great artist. Thus Mozart
was able to produce musical creations of a perfection that knows no
equal, with no correcting or rewriting or other creative struggling,
directly from his brain to the musical notes on the page, as though the
music had been preserved on a tape inserted into his brain by an
invisible hand. Thus a literary artist such as Dostoyevsky - a name
pulled at random from a long list of such names - was able to delve
into the subtleties of the human mind so deeply as to provide
inspiration for the likes of Nietsche and Freud, who came after him.
Dostoyevsky did not merely provide inspiration and influence for the
science of psychology that later became the established, accepted
source of
rules, criteria, and applications in the field of mental health in the
twentieth century. Dostoyevsky laid the actual foundations of modern
psychological theory. This remark is not intended to express an opinion
about the quality or validity of this theory, for this is a highly
controversial issue still unresolved to this day.
Yet no one contests the fact that a qualitative intelligence exists
that is not a corollary of, and has no connection with the mechanism of
cognition. Surprisingly enough, I do not mean to attribute any human
quality to these geniuses, despite their impressive achievements. The
fact that the quality of a work is unable to testify to the quality of
human character in the great artist proves the absence of any such
connection. Too often, their human perfection was in reverse
correlation to the artistic perfection and quality of their work.
Continuing in the direction of my historical question to Piaget, let us
sharpen our inquiry even further: Moral behavior, perfection of
character, courage, bravery, insight, common sense: Which among the
systems fixed into natural law can account for them? To what extent can
one view them as personal achievements, rather than as a product of the
achievement of some mechanical system? Does any quality exist that is
not connected to a predetermined system? And if no such quality exists
in systemic reality, what shall be the fate of free choice? Is the
entire issue of free choice not perhaps an illusion, a sweet fantasy?
Does freedom exist? Personal responsibility? Can there be any
justification to reward and punishment? To judging behavior? To
demanding that the individual distinguish good from evil? Might such a
demand not be a cruel mockery, if one is faced with behavior that is
the inevitable outcome of mechanical systems operated by predetermined
rules?
This is why the Torah devotes so much attention to guiding the subtle
distinctions between minute particulars. The Torah addresses the
smallest details of the human tendency toward a systematic attitude. It
drives in stakes and erects barriers intended to stall the inexorable
and irresistible pull, by which a human being is drawn unresistingly
into an automatic merging with and succumbing to systemic factors.
Human behavior constitutes an inseparable aspect of the systemic
factor, and this gravitational pull penetrates to the very fabric of
human existence, both internally and externally.
On the basis of this understanding, we may comprehend why the Torah
addresses, through the positive and negative mitzvos, behaviors that
seem to have nothing to do with values. There are commandments that
seem not to deal with ideals at all but rather with the smallest of
small change, to the point that they appear almost petty, as though
deliberately digging about in the refuse of existence. Laws for using
the bathroom, for example, take up a number of pages in Maseches
Brochos. What has spirituality to do with leprosy? With the biological
cycle of women? Of men? Why does the Torah make such a to-do over
eating, with laws of kashrus that enter the most picayune of minute
details, all of a purely technical character? To what point this
tendency to attach a mass of tedious technical preoccupations with the
world of values, of concepts, of symbols expressing abstract ideas?
What spiritual tidings are borne by the laws of kashrus and of
prohibited foods?
To be continued...
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