The interesting speech of Professor Jeremiah Yuval, winner of the Israel Prize for the year 2000
Prof. Yeremiahu Yuval. The text was received from the Israel Prize Committee.
Honorable President of the State, Honorable President of the Supreme Court, Honorable Prime Minister, Honorable Minister of Education, Honorable Mayor of Jerusalem, Dr. Goldberger, my fellow recipients of the award, distinguished audience: First, allow me to thank myself and my colleagues for the Israel Prize that was awarded to us, and for the recognition of our work embodied in it. When a country gives such a high prize to a creative person or thinker, male or female, it may embarrass them because of this close official embrace. But on second thought, the recipients of the award were freely chosen by their peers, each and every one in their field; The state only added to this its Goshpanka, which as such is welcome and respected. To receive the award from a body that embodies the political sovereignty of the Jews, and the renewal of their culture in the Hebrew language - is definitely a joy. What's more, in the words of a famous trio who a moment ago received the award from the President: "The world is funny, so we laugh."
I will dedicate my short remarks tonight to the concept of reason. I come from the world of philosophy, where the concept of reason is central; But far beyond that, the concept of reason has a fundamental role in the construction of our culture - of the world of research, thought, law, society, and also of elite religion and art. Reason in its various guises and guises built both the ancient Roman-Hellenic world, the Middle Ages and to a considerable extent the Renaissance, and - mainly - the modern world that has grown since then, including those ramifications of it that today are called "post-modernity", and in fact are corrections and path-finding within modernity itself . In the next few minutes I will therefore give, at the beginning of chapters, a report on the state of reason, in our country and in the world.
Reason is, fundamentally, a combination of intellect and experience. This is reason controlled by experience, and experience guided and interpreted by reason. The mind is the power of thought; The experience is the contact with the real world; And they both share in the power of reason, which does not allow one of them exclusive rule. The experience does not have value and weight in its own right, but because reason attributes this value to it - - because it sees it as a component of itself and of the culture of life built on it. Moreover, reason needs experience to restrain itself, that is, the impetuous and presumptuous power of thought, which always strives to go beyond itself. That's why experience - at least in our culture - is part of the concept of reason itself.
However, despite the centrality of reason to culture and the very definition of man, we live in a time when many challenge the authority and status of reason. Her enemies come from within her - and from outside as well.
The first dangerous enemy of this reason is itself - when it takes shape as exemplary reason. This means: that it claims to be absolute, eternal, infinite - that it does not recognize its own finitude (which is the finitude of man), and does not show tolerance and patience towards factors of transience and uncertainty, which are a necessary component of critical reason. In one, when reason tries to disguise itself as the religious absolute. But there are those who challenge reason from the outside, of whom I will name three tonight.
Today there is a new wave of turning to superstition, magic, sorcery and the mundane and meaningless experience - all because reason, by its critical nature, is not able to answer all questions. That's why humans ask them for an answer through illusion and hallucination, through magicians and clouders and sorcerers of all kinds, and those who take advantage of the weakness of humans, create power bases for them at the expense of our illusions, or trade in our fears and hopes; And so they trade, in effect, in us, and get rich or acquire political power at the expense of the unavoidable uncertainty in our lives. Even serious religion is ashamed of such a superstition.
The result is that these people, and those who fall into their net, destroy what reason is capable of building - - and this is no small thing at all (rather, it is the essence of human culture); And at the same time they create an illusion, as if it is possible to answer everything, and banish from our world all the elements of question and uncertainty. Thus we fall victim to charlatans on the one hand, and to a religious power establishment that uses superstition for its needs, on the other.
By the way, it is no coincidence that these opponents of reason are also the enemies of the question. After all, a person is permitted not only in his intellect, but also in his ability to ask. If we could not ask, we would not be able to answer either, and therefore know the little that can be known; And on the other hand, if we couldn't ask more than we could answer, maybe we wouldn't be human. Because man always strives for more than his intelligence is able to give him, and many times he strives for certainty, absoluteness, eternity and infinity. As an aspiration, there may be nothing human about it; But when it seems to us that we have fulfilled this ambition, or that it can be realized at all - we have exceeded the human limits into the world of legend, and perhaps also self-deception, because we have provided ourselves with false consolations and allowed others to deceive us and control us.
Another opponent of reason nowadays is the claim that reason is tyrannical, that rationality (rationality) means suppression of life and political tyranny. This claim is heard today in various circles and has become a fashionable slogan. (There are even those who add that reason is a "male invention" that came to oppress women). Certainly, reason, like anything, can twist and serve tyrannical purposes, but this does not stem from its nature but from what those in power and domination do to it. The tyrants almost always find tools and ideologies that will serve them. And yet, as we remember, the worst tyranny of the last century actually used an attack on reason, and relied mainly on the enemies of reason - on tribal romanticism, on ethnic and nationalistic fervor, on racism and the cultivation of group identity creations as a supreme value.
1. Those who slander reason as if oppression is its essence, do not understand the liberation, the little freedom, the degree of human emancipation that critical reason is capable of providing. And indeed, when the argument of these people is serious, it refers only to exemplary reason; And on the other hand, they themselves are built from the rational culture they challenge. Because, against common sense, they exalt the rights of individuals and special groups (or the different "cultures", as they are called); But when they are asked: why should we consider all these groups, cultivate their culture and so on - they have no serious answer other than pointing to their humanity, for being an expression of some value inherent in human beings or that should be given to them; And thus they repeatedly rely on the common sense that they set out to destroy.
2. A third enemy of reason are some of its offspring, the legal ones and especially the illegal ones. Chief among them is the winning technology, advanced globalization, and the perception of culture as commercialized entertainment (what we call "rating culture"). I do not mean technology as a mere device - which also has many blessings - but the technological culture that was built on the foundation of this device, its control over the very foundations of civilization. Together with global capitalism - which is also built on the concept of false generality - a process is created that uproots man from his humanity and essentially turns him into a consumer. Our duty is to consume, and this is also what measures our worth as human beings; And human freedom is the freedom to choose between similar and almost identical consumer goods. Furthermore, the freedom of speech and thought - apparently the most human element, and the most rational within us - unfolds in its inversion. Freedom of speech and thought has become a factor of power and strength expressed in the ownership of the media, whose purpose is to obscure and dumb us down, disrupt our freedom of choice and thought and flood us with temptations and stimuli, so that we consume more and think less. And surrendering to this attack on our autonomy - that is, the question of whether we behave well and consume in accordance with the instructions we received from the instigators of consumption known as "advertisers" and their representatives in the so-called "media" - even becomes a test of our good citizenship. By the way, the expression "communication" is of course a misnomer, since we do not communicate if no one uses it; We are only tolerantly exposed to a one-sided bombardment of stimuli, which tries to disrupt our minds and cheapen our taste and the quality of our lives, and this in the name of "our" so-called freedom of expression - which is actually the power given to others to try to deny our freedom.
3. In this way reason itself becomes a manipulative factor, just as culture descends to the level of commercialized entertainment; And human beings - creatures of reason - are seen in this system as existing for the sake of the system, as a means to feed and push it forward, and not as goals and ends in themselves, as the great thinkers wanted to see them.
But all these are the bastards of reason and not its legitimate children; These are distortions and convulsions in which it is directed against itself and against its self-meaning.
The question now is, how can reason stand against all these attacks. Admittedly, there is no guarantee that she will be able to compete successfully against those who I called "bastards".. But if she can, two directions can be pointed out:
The other direction, that we will be aware of the attack on our autonomy. Let us know what is happening to us, let us not be deceived, let us not allow ourselves to be carried away by what they want to carry us away, but rather build our individuality, our uniqueness, the value of each individual on his own.
Of course, this is very difficult to do alone. Maybe it's a paradox, but a unit is not built from unities. There is a need for a plurality of individuals, an atmosphere that encourages them, a complete culture that makes them possible is needed. Although, in general, this is not the case today. The face of reason is not clearly visible in the portrait that is presented to us of ourselves. Still, not everything is negative in the current situation. Fortunately, reason also has successes, it has anchors and authentic outposts in our culture. These outposts can and should be cultivated, in such a way that individual people can lean on the anchors and these outposts to say: I refuse (or refuse); I do not agree to be carried away; I intend to keep my freedom; And above all - I mean to think for myself.
So much for what the individual can do (and by the word "individual" I mean men and women without distinction). On the other hand, it is extremely important - and no less difficult - to reject the exemplary manifestations of reason, and to sharpen its critical edge - also regarding what is around it, but first of all regarding itself. And this requires that we not be satisfied with the concept of critical reason of the previous generations, which was not sharpened enough. We need a different rational culture, which will grasp the concept of reason differently than we are used to, and in an even more critical manner.
This means, in one sentence: we need to learn to live at peace with the impermanence and partiality of reason, to accept uncertainty as an essential component of any critical reason, and to see the culture, the civilization based on critical and final reason which - as meaningful and valuable - also has value Normative - without being absolute.
In other words, not to make reason a substitute for religion. It's not her job, and it's not what she can do. We do not need to feel failure when reason does not give answers in the form of religion, that is, when we are not familiar with illusions. A rational person only has reason. Reason is the foundation of every truth, of every value we can have in this world. But it is not eternal, nor absolute, nor infinite - as we ourselves are not like that.
