Jacob Howland
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jacob Howland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And there's this entire alternative way of thinking about things. So if you simply separate reason from that, you're going to get totalitarianism and kind of the lunacy that we see.
If you separate religion from the alternative that, well, man has reason, and man is able to figure things out, and there are things that we can understand about nature and the world and science that aren't in the religious tradition, then you're going to end up with, say, Islamic extremism or something. You see what I'm saying?
In other words, a healthy human existence is to dwell in the space of the permanent questions, which must be informed by these alternatives. And Strauss is very good on this. He says, there's no philosophical proof that the Bible is wrong, right? You're always making assumptions that are simply going to sort of prejudice the conclusions that you're going to. So we have to live in this space.
And Strauss's claim, which I really think is great, is that the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is the coiled spring of the greatness of the West, that we have to understand that. But now what I've come to understand, this is a kind of moderation, right?
Because if you say, no, reason's it, anything that's not rational, you've got some kind of positivism or whatever, you're going to go straight to that man-God thing, right? You're going to go straight to that totalitarian. The train's going to stop at the death camp, basically.
But if you also say, no, there's no reason, which is one more thing I just want to say about my book on Plato and the Talmud. I've already suggested that Socratic philosophizing begins with this revelation of Delphi, which Socrates takes seriously. Who is Socrates? What is wisdom? But he's convinced that there must be an answer because the God can't speak falsely.
The rabbis, there's a great book called Rational Rabbis by a guy named Menachem Fisch. And believe it or not, he talks about the rabbis of the Talmud. The first 40 pages is about Karl Popper's theory of falsification in science, which is a great, humble theory, right? It's that we can't prove laws like the law of gravity. We can only falsify them.
We can conduct experiments that if they turn out a certain way, will falsify the formulation of the law of gravity.
Right. So then this guy argues that the rabbis are rational, and they are in a sense, they're playing the Socratic game of rationality within the horizon of revelation. So they start with the Torah.
Well, look, what you just said is very rich and I think very attractive and interesting. So let me start with a question, I guess. Doesn't this all mean then that – We have to find the proper aim. And if we find the proper aim, then our questions are going to be helpful and productive to us as human beings. So let's go back to the very first commandment.
Yeah, right. Well, that's a great story too, because if you read it carefully, they say, let's bake bricks. So they bake the bricks. And that's fascinating because they break it out of adamah, which is the soil that man is made out of, adam, et cetera. And then they say, let's make a tower. Now, this may be over-interpreting, but first we'll develop the bricks.
And then we'll figure out what to do with them. Like the technological thing comes before. It actually reminds me of like the CIA discovers LSD. I mean, they don't discover it, but they're like, we got LSD. So now their question is, what can we do with it? There's a book about this. And so they say, well, is it a truth serum? So they give LSD to this CIA guy. No, it's not, you know.
Well, maybe it's an anti-truth serum. We give it to our agents if they're caught and stuff like that. No, it's not. But this kind of reasoning, right? Like, this is potent stuff. This is super potent stuff. What can we do with it, right? But anyway, you're absolutely right about the misaligned aim.
Well, that's true. Right.
Yeah. I mean, and so what you said about the Sermon on the Mount is anticipated by God in the very first commandment. I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods beside me.
Now, what's interesting is that, you know, it doesn't mean that we don't have subsidiary aims. But what it means is that's the highest. That's the highest. Yeah. For Socrates, what is the highest? Well, he calls these things ideas, you know, justice, for example. And the Socratic, what Socrates is trying to do is a sort of shuttling movement.
First of all, to come to the best possible understanding he can of, for example, the idea of justice, which plays a huge role in his life. But you know the cave image. There aren't any signs that say you are now leaving the cave and entering into the full light of truth, right? So there's always a question. Have I truly understood this thing?
Then the other thing he has to do is to try to live up to the ideas. Or, if you want to put it the other way, to take the idea into his life as a matter of his existence.
Exactly, exactly. So he's trying to do these things. But for him, the highest is... Frankly, I mean, you can call it the beautiful as per the symposium. You can call it the good as per the Republic. But, of course, the good is analogized to the sun.
And the sun, in a way, has no form or no... Like, if the soul, if the mind is compared to the eye, then the mind is destroyed by looking directly at the sun or at the good, right? So, that's the connection between... Plato and the Talmud, because... It's that upward aim. It's this upward aim.
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