The Degeneration of the Nation
An Essay on the History of Philosophy
Philosophy as Never Seen Before: A particularly concise essay that deconstructs and reconstructs the entire history of Western philosophy from the perspective of the philosophy of learning. Another small masterpiece from the Netanya School (Estimated reading time: 15 minutes of glory)
By: A Philosopher of Philosophy
A view of philosophy from the methods beneath it reveals the method that drives the history of philosophy (Source)

A Bizarre Beginning: Why did monotheism defeat philosophy in the first round and lose in the second?

Philosophy begins its development in a strange and unnatural way - and worst of all: illogical. The stranger and less intuitive ideas - the furthest from common sense - appear at the beginning. Why does Plato come before Aristotle, and not the other way around? Why do the Pre-Socratics come before Socrates? Is it just because of the time that has passed, that it seems more strange to us? (As if the history of the spirit is an accumulation of mutations - and therefore the distant in time is the more distant in spirit - in a kind of parallel to space-time: time-spirit). If so, what is the difference between Plato and Aristotle in terms of the distance in time versus the distance in spirit (after all, Aristotle is much more natural to us)? Where did the strange, almost mystical thinking come from: everything is water, being is and non-being is not - conclusion: there is no movement in the world, no man does evil willingly, learning is remembering, the world of ideas, etc.

Well - it obviously came from mysticism. The beginning of philosophy was in a mystical cult (so too in China and India - for example the Dao De Jing, which should be compared to the Sefer Yetzirah [Book of Creation]). And science also started from a mystical cult - that's how Pythagoras began, for example. And therefore the strange thoughts were replaced throughout the history of philosophy with less strange thoughts, until we have reached today an almost abnormal normality in its normality (which some think is the purpose of philosophy), and we have lost the mythical in the philosophical. Because philosophy did not begin, as it tells itself, in thought, that is, from some spiritual zero point. It started from much more religious and mythical thinking - idolatry - and only gradually and through long distillation did it become logical thinking. That's why it started in poetry, with the Pre-Socratics for example, and then moved to dialogue (which comes from Greek drama - very religious - and opposes it!), and only at the end moved to an orderly lecture. And the strange ideas were an improvement - significantly less strange than the idolatrous myth.

Philosophy should be depicted not as being born out of secularism or rationality (this is a modern bias) but out of idolatry. Idolatry fell into a paradigmatic crisis at that time, and from it emerged two schools, which are still fighting today: monotheism (for us) and philosophy. At first, philosophy won for a little less than a thousand years (until the Christianization of the empire), and then our school (monotheistic) won for a little less than a thousand years (until the end of the Middle Ages), and since then philosophy has been winning (not final). And therefore Judaism, which is older in spirit-time, is a much stranger religion than Christianity, which is a much stranger religion than Islam. And that's why we have the most holidays, and Christianity has fewer and Islam even fewer (the same goes for commandments). There is no spiritual zero point. Unless non-human intelligence will be a reset point. And then all the strange human ideas will disappear and we will be left with mathematics alone (living information), or worse - dead information.

Because not only did the science of modern times start from mysticism (alchemy, Christian Kabbalah, etc.), but also the science of ancient times. Because mysticism is a departure from myth - from narrative - towards abstraction, and not an approach to it. Therefore, it is a stage between idolatry and its successors. And from it emerged together monotheism and philosophy - both came to answer at the same time the same questions in spirit-time, and split from the same junction, so they can be seen as perpendicular lines in spirit-time, that is, coordinates that span a certain space. Seemingly - Aristotle is more secular and commonsensical and justified than Plato. But since Plato comes out of myth, he was ultimately even more right - because myth too was not created from the zero point, but from human nature, that is, from nature. Plato was right, for example, because today we understand with the help of neuro that there is a world of ideas within us. That the ideal triangle is wired in us (in the visual system in the brain). And so are beauty and justice, etc.

And why is what is wired within us also shared with the world? Because the triangle, for example, is wired in mathematics (which is behind the neurons). And the unreasonable usefulness of mathematics in the sciences is Plato's victory. And beauty and justice are also wired in nature, within evolution, which planted ideas in us before our birth. The ideas may be much more abstract (mathematically) than Plato thought - but they are the ones that determined us. And in the end, the philosophy and science of the ancient world were not directly defeated by their monotheistic competitor, but by technology - the Romans - who defeated science (and then monotheism finally defeated them. In a kind of historical game of rock-paper-scissors). So today too, technology is going to defeat science and philosophy. And technology can be defeated again by myth, as it defeated Rome - so it can defeat the USA.


Why did Greek philosophy fail (and not become modern science and enlightenment), unlike the philosophy of modern times?

The understanding of philosophy as the history of learning begins with the realization that Plato is homeomorphic to Aristotle, that is, there is no essential difference between them in the structure of the ontological worldview, and the world of forms and groups of forms can be two names for the same coin (the skeptic would argue). So if there is no difference in the structure itself - what is the difference? That Plato goes from the world of spirit towards the world of matter, while Aristotle goes from the world of matter towards the world of spirit, that is, the difference is the direction of learning, where we learn from to where - from the general to the particular or from the particular to the general (a difference in method, which only pretends to be a difference in the perception of the structure of the world).

Precisely because there were two such great and close figures, Plato and Aristotle, who were disputants (unlike Socrates, who was a teacher) - this paralyzed philosophy for over a thousand years afterwards, because they spread out a space of possibilities in two axes. If there was only Plato, philosophy would have developed afterwards into countless small Aristotles who rebelled against the great father (like those who came out of Descartes, Kant or Wittgenstein). Aristotle happened too quickly, too strongly, too well-reasoned, and the philosophical space was imprisoned between Aristotle and Plato, that is, it became closed and not open. And what explains the unreasonable and unique appearance in the history of philosophy of two such close pillars and giants? The achievement of Greek philosophy (and the Greek world in general) is an achievement of the homosexual world, which was exceptionally fast because of the passion that integrated with knowledge, and it took the straight world thousands of years to catch up.

We are talking about an exceptionally intense intellectual eros of teacher-student relationships (which today would be considered rape) that was recreated in the history of philosophy only in the Wittgensteinian explosion, and which is radically different from the learning accepted today. Therefore, it is difficult for us to appreciate its power, but we can appreciate it if we notice that it directly combines (and not sublimatively) all the primary human relationships: sexual relations, status, parenthood and teaching (that is, we are not talking about homosexuality per se but about intellectual incest). Hence also the strange name for philosophy: love of wisdom. That is, it is precisely the most forbidden combination in our time - intersection (both and) of all moral boundaries (either or), whose purpose is to create maximum tension (and as unpleasant as it is for us to hear - this is the social structure that distinguished the Greeks from all world cultures, not democracy).

Therefore, Greek progress was illogical in terms of other periods, and without a historical catastrophe that stopped democratic Greece (mainly Rome) we would today be in homosexual modern science (which would have developed already two thousand years ago). Another two hundred years of development at such a pace and Greek science would have made the leap to modern science. The mechanisms of straight desire separate knowledge from sex (this is the medieval separation between spirit and matter), unlike Greek homosexuality, and therefore their speed and efficiency are much lower (because the strongest engine is weaker - the Jews bypassed this by giving the rabbi's daughter to a scholar, but it's not the same efficiency, because of the mediation - that is, the sublimation).

The one who reconnected spirit and matter was Descartes, when the connection was the I. That is, in terms of learning, Descartes was the one who started learning from the I (and therefore he deals with certainty - the knowledge of the I - and not with truth - the knowledge itself). This is a completely perpendicular direction to the two directions that Platoristotle spread. Hence Descartes' emphasis on method, because the big change was in learning. No more teacher-student learning but self-learning. In teacher-student learning there are two directions, and therefore a dominant flow from the past to the present (Aristotle as a rebel wanted reverse learning from student to teacher, and therefore there was a counter-current from the present to the past - but still everything within the framework of past-present relations, that is, teacher-student), while in self-learning the direction is from the present to the future.

Another homosexual philosophical explosion happened in the modern period, with Wittgenstein's intense intellectual eros, where he managed to be both the Plato of language (early) and the Aristotle of language (late), and we know that he slept with followers from both schools (and this gives us an example of the power of eros combined with philosophy. After all, it is clear to us that Plato slept with Aristotle). But only the traditional disconnection between sexual eros and philosophy explains why such a high percentage of philosophers in history had no children.


Why are there no great Roman philosophers?

Rome not only destroyed the Greek world but also created a change in sexuality: it destroyed the Greek intellectual eros in favor of forceful masculinity. And Rome - as a parable and for example - killed the greatest mathematical mind in history, Archimedes, who we know today was already in the middle of inventing infinitesimal calculus. Three more Archimedes and there would have been a scientific revolution in ancient times, and Rome stopped the process. That is, it is not the Middle Ages that should be blamed for the delay of two thousand years, but Rome (whose imperial version of philosophy parallels the American version: Stoicism is the pragmatism of the ancient world).

Only the anti-religion of secular historians buys the thesis of continuity called the Greco-Roman world. This is exactly like calling Christianity and the Middle Ages the Judeo-Roman world. Rome destroyed the Greek world with the same thoroughness that it destroyed the Jewish world, although in different periods it told itself that it was the true successor of both. In fact, the Roman thesis was a need of the Renaissance because both were born in the same boot-shaped country. Plato and Aristotle would have looked at the Roman world exactly as the Jews looked at it: as barbarians.

In any case, it should be understood that in the first two thousand years after the beginning of philosophy it did not appear as a field that has a history, as we see it today and know that after us there will be more philosophers who will fundamentally change the worldview. On the contrary, it seemed as if Plato and Aristotle were the natural essential outcome of philosophy itself, and therefore both were created in close proximity together from its very beginning (and after them none like them arose), and they are simply the two great possibilities arising from it: thesis and antithesis (without the mechanism that turns the synthesis into the new thesis). That is, within philosophy itself the idea of paradigmatic change was missing, which became its central feature in modern times, sometimes to the point of absurdity, when every philosopher must be a new paradigm to be recognized as great, and the result is paradigmatic inflation and lack of stable ground (as we shall see, in the philosophy of learning the stable ground is the history of philosophy itself).

That is, philosophy was not a field at all but a paradigm (because in a field there are paradigmatic changes, and more precisely: changes of methods). It was a specific conceptual world structure, almost a doctrine, and in this structure there were two sides that played ping pong, without the idea of changing the field itself as a beautiful move in the game. It lacked the aesthetics of paradigmatic change (today looking at everything from an unexpected angle is considered beautiful and appreciated, and this itself is an aesthetics of the individual, the "I", who has a perspective).

Plato and Aristotle were as basic as matter and spirit and the world was indeed dualism. Therefore, there was no "medieval philosophy" (an anachronistic name) as a period in the history of philosophy because philosophy was there like Stoicism in our time, the name of a school, and not the name of a field of learning, that is, a field that learns - and therefore has periods. This is the trap of the two greats. Precisely because they collide and push against each other with force, they crush the space of possibilities in spirit-time like a sandwich.


Why are we living in secular Middle Ages?

If we were living in a different cultural climate, the philosophical world would consider the scientific knowledge of our time as proof of the existence of God, as in the Middle Ages - and in all scientific disciplines. Both the very existence of mathematics and its wonderful complexity would be proofs of the intelligent design - and intelligence - of the world. Certainly its unreasonable usefulness in physics (this would not be a famous article - but a probable proof of the existence of God). The anthropic principle in physics and the fine-tuning of the constants of nature and the quantum observer and our existence out of the multiverse - all these would be proofs of the existence of God. And the more physics builds free models in which we are only a possibility out of a monstrous solution space, the stronger this argument would become. After all, why this universe, whose existence is infinitesimal according to all models?

And so too biology, with Fermi's paradox, and the existing fact of all the improbable coincidences in evolution (and the paradox indeed shows their improbability) - all these would be considered strong evidence for divine design, and even for guidance (general providence). So that the mockery of the proofs for the existence of God from the watchmaker argument is anachronistic, because according to the scientific picture today the universe is indeed a "watch", that is, something that can be explained only by a particularly fine, complex and precise tuning (we simply don't believe it's a watch, contrary to the "objective" scientific picture, for religious reasons - and they are that we are secular).

In addition, Descartes' argument for escaping doubt that relies on God, and therefore seems ridiculous to us, would have seemed valid and legitimate to us if only we had replaced the word God with the word mathematics. That is - there is within me a concept of mathematics, with proofs and wonderful and infinite complexity, and I could never have reached this concept on my own, and to the genius proofs and this richness and beauty on my own. That is, precisely our limitation compared to something infinite (in its complexity! compared to our processor capabilities) shows that the idea exists and comes from outside me, and confirms the existence of reason (stupidity could not have created mathematics) and the existence of an external world.

And then physics, by its deep mathematical nature (and the deep mathematics within it, which can be identified from the mathematical idea from the previous stage), is confirmed in the second stage, because such a coincidental or invented, or even malicious match is not possible, because the match is too wonderful and wise, to the point of improbability, above all human genius - that is, there is wonderful logic in the universe. If a demon planted mathematics in us - then this demon is God.

Because it doesn't matter to us if the demon is good or evil, but if we can know the world in which we are and see. And precisely the deep and infinitely difficult lawfulness of this world (as opposed to lawlessness, or simple and superficial lawfulness that could be invented, or lawfulness that some agent other than the universe itself could create) proves its validity, that is, its existence - that is, existence no less than mathematical existence. That is: a coherent world, deep beyond investigation and certainly no less certain than the thing held to be most certain - mathematics. The same mathematics that simply imposes on us in our discovery of it forms with unimaginable depth that we could not have invented ourselves, and is built with genius above all finite intelligence. And therefore always as mathematicians we have a sense of discovery and not invention, a sense of reality so strong, and full of sublimity and wisdom deep to infinity. And mathematics is indeed infinite, that is, we can never know it all, and this can be proved - mathematically! (And let's be precise: this philosophical proof is not built on elementary school mathematics, but on all mathematics as a whole that no person can grasp. It does not stem from "Pythagoras' theorem" but from the breathtaking and infinite landscape that unfolds before us in modern mathematics).

Today, with complexity theory, we see computational capabilities that exist in the universe that we cannot have, and therefore with them it can be proved that physics is external to us (because quantum computability, for example, surpasses ours, as can be mathematically proved). Hence, if P!=NP then this has philosophical significance, because since we are limited to P (and this too can be proved from the nature of neurons, or from our phenomenological computational ability) there is a whole mathematical-computational world that is fundamentally inaccessible to us, but we can verify it (and hence the return of Descartes' demon today in computer science theory, in the version of interactive proof, and our proven ability to defeat it - that is, to verify the correctness of a proof that we cannot even read in its entirety).

This can also be viewed as follows: The gap growing to infinity compared to us in complexity replaces the infinite size of the Cartesian God compared to us. We can check (for example as true/false) and evaluate (for example as aesthetic) something that we cannot produce, that is, we as a process are in a fundamental and infinite gap against an external process, and therefore there is also an external process to us and it is objective in relation to us - that is: it is an external world. In the direction of beauty we can also take the fields of art and literature that we have been exposed to, which we could not produce ourselves. For example: classical music produces for my consciousness a listening sequence to symphonies that is beyond my understanding and I cannot write even one symphony by Beethoven, although I can appreciate his genius as a listener, and therefore music is a product of a world external to me. And so mathematics is a field of proofs that I can systematically check as correct/incorrect, but I cannot, fundamentally and mathematically, systematically find proofs for mathematical conjectures. Therefore the gap shows that mathematics is objective and not dependent on me.


Who will be the Kant of the 21st century?

Philosophy has again reached a stage where it needs a Kant, who will unite the Continental tradition and the English tradition (and today, and this is the center of the problem, also American) that split from the Descartes of our time (namely Wittgenstein, from whom emerged the linguistic turn just as epistemology emerged from Descartes). And despite the prestige (eternal!) of such a position in the philosophical eternity - there are no contenders. There is no one who will try to be the great synthesis between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy, and unite them anew. In fact, that same one needs to close the language problem (and the space it opened, because a space of discourse is destined to become two schools) - and open a new problem (learning!).

Let us recall that only when Kant addressed Hume's questions, that is, when one school troubled itself with the other school - the Kantian revolution was created, and today both sides of the sea (and ocean) are sinking and sunk in their dogmatic slumber (the central sign of crisis: academization and distancing from the public and turning philosophy into jargon, as in the Middle Ages, which is the next stage of degeneration, because the very continued existence of schools leads to dogmatism and internal discourse - and even to going backwards, for example to metaphysics, as we see today).

Kant himself, by the way, was not just a synthesis of the two approaches (in the middle), or a compromise between them, but a victory of rationalism over empiricism, in light of the crisis of empiricism, and this is because he was Continental. But the victory was achieved only through addressing the other side, and absorbing it within you. Therefore Kant is empiricism caught in rationalist tools. Therefore, the two traditions in our time should have seemingly fought over which of them would produce the next Kant - which is their victory. Kant's victory was expressed in the gap between his great successors in the Continental tradition compared to the lack of such on the other side of the waters - and the decline of English philosophy in the 19th century (to the point of transferring the empiricist center of gravity to the USA to pragmatism).

Before we try to characterize the next Kant (as a solution to the intersection of two equations in the spirit of time - that is, the place in the spirit of time where they meet again), we need to understand the lines that create the two equations (of the two schools) so that we can continue them further. And therefore we must ask: In what way does analytic philosophy continue and resemble empiricism and Continental philosophy of our time continue and resemble rationalism? How do the two lines continue the character of the two cultures (English and European)? After all, seemingly the mathematical tendency of analytic philosophy is closer to rationalism (the distancing from actual language), and it is actually in Continental philosophy of our time that there is more connection and engagement with the real, empirical world?

Well, the English historical continuity is preserved in the scientific style, and the Continental continuity in the ideational style, that is, the tendency towards big ideas with great meaning. That is, it is not a matter of content, but of style, and of understanding what philosophy is: clean (precise, orderly, detailed, small) versus big (vague but meaningful, important, deep). Therefore, the line can also be continued backwards: Aristotle is the English, and Plato is the Continental. In this view of the history of philosophy, what led to its gradual decline after them is the absence of a great philosopher who would make a synthesis and unification between the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions, in a deep way - that is, the absence of an ancient Kant.

Therefore if we try to turn the two styles into a structure that exists throughout the history of philosophy and is essential to it and necessary within it, we will have to examine what it resembles outside of it (in the spirit of time), because it does not rely on specific and fixed content within it. After all, we see how this dual structure repeats itself again and again throughout the history of philosophy, like the double helix of DNA, and the two lines define again and again the two sides of philosophy - and therefore its central domain (and its peaks are the rare meetings between them - Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the missing philosopher in the history of philosophy - the philosopher who was not, because of whom philosophy declined - the Kant of ancient times). If so, what are the two boundaries of philosophy, which characterize the two sides? What are the two non-philosophical tendencies on which it relies, and which create the two styles within it?

Well, the Continental tradition is closer to mysticism (on one side) and the English to science (on the other side), whose Pythagorean combination is the cradle of philosophy. That is, these are two styles of learning, two methods, and not for example two sides in a basic spiritual structure (like matter and spirit), or in the worldview (because this view undergoes far-reaching changes throughout the history of philosophy - and the differences in methodical style remain). The English style is proofs and evidence, and the Continental style is deep insights, and necessarily more speculative. One side hates risk and the other side loves chance, but it was always the Continental side, the chance-lover, who in its confrontation with risk-aversion (Descartes with doubt, Kant with Hume, Wittgenstein with Russell) brought about the great breakthrough.

Therefore, the next Kant will need to create again a combination between the philosophical method in the mystical style and the method in the scientific style. The psychophysical problem that previously divided the two styles is replaced by the problem of meaning, when one side, the analytic, tries to imitate scientific language in philosophy, and the other side, the Continental, tries to imitate mystical language in philosophy (and thus draws a lot, sometimes unknowingly, from religious interpretation). And then from the next Kant, who will replace the linguistic turn with the learning turn, two schools of learning can really emerge, one Continental of more mystical learning and the other English of more scientific learning. And when we talk about mystical learning, the best historical example is Kabbalah. This is learning of deep and bold interpretation that brings meaning to fruition (but without playfulness but out of scholarly seriousness). Therefore the question of meaning, language and text will be solved by the next Kant, may he come soon, through the idea of learning language and text, and the emphasis will then shift to the learning system itself, in the question of how learning is created. And even technologically, there will be a transition from language technologies to learning technologies - a process that is already beginning today, for example in computer science and biology (and even constitutes potential for the next revolution in physics, in finding an adaptive learning process that could explain the fine-tuning of the universe, and will in turn constitute a physical reason for the improbable existence of learning in our world).

From the English side this will be precise learning, in a legal style, like in the Talmud (or in mathematical learning), and from the Continental side there will be vague but deep learning, in a thoughtful and ideational style, like in Kabbalah. And all the current discourse on both sides will be perceived as two learning systems. So what will the new Kant say? What creates the language system - it's learning. Language without a learning system is indeed worthless, and it is indeed like a meaningless game. What gives the game its meaning and importance and abilities and seriousness is precisely its development as part of a learning system, which created it and will continue to create through it (a book has no meaning without literature, an event has no meaning without history, a limited company has no meaning without its future development, a thought has no meaning without being part of learning). The worship of the language system is like looking at the dry law (say halakha) as a fixed scarecrow skeleton (like a fundamentalist), without the system of change in the law behind it that drives it (legislation, purposes of the law, development of the law, struggles and needed amendments), that is, like Torah without Torah study.

We should not focus on the information itself (that is, in language), but on the learning system that produces it and develops it further - that's where the meaning is. The meaning of language is as part of the learning process, just as the meaning of the genome stems from evolution (and it has no meaning external to it). And in general, the category of meaning needs to be replaced by a much more important and essential (and learning) category - interest. The interest in language (or any other system) stems from the learning processes in it. And what is common to scientific language and mystical language is the learning process at their base, and at the base of any language. Therefore language can be grasped only through the category of learning, and therefore learning can be the new common basis of the two schools.

Learning can be precise (like in mathematics and science), or vague (like in the brain), but a true description of it will show that even scientific learning is not formal inference, and even mystical learning is not intuition from heaven. Learning systems are complex systems, which develop with creativity on one side and criticism of their products on the other side, that is, with a positive creative category and a negative evaluative category. Therefore learning lives in the space between P and NP (in the borrowed and non-borrowed sense), that is, between what is known and accepted to what can be checked and evaluated. And the huge gap between the boundaries of these two domains requires learning (if P=NP there is no real learning).

In scientific learning the evaluation function is seemingly clear (the empirical experiment). In contrast, in mystical learning even the evaluation function is mysterious, although it works, because it is an open function (for example what is beautiful, exemplary or canonical) - like in literature for example (but it is a fact that there is canonical literature just as it is a fact that there is canonical mathematics, that is - the open evaluation function does work well and not "anything goes"). And this is the deep division between the two styles: closed or open evaluation function - precise or vague and deep. It's a personal matter of what you're looking for in life, and different cultures have different tendencies. We, the Jews, have a third tendency: to try to manipulate and break through the evaluation function.


What progresses in the history of philosophy and in what sense can we speak of its progress?

What is the worldview of learning? The spirit-time is the equivalent in the world of spirit to space-time in the world of matter. The spirit-time is the variety (space!) of spiritual possibilities possible at a given time (because Plato cannot think about a computer, or about a Turing machine, despite them being simple concepts - why? Only learning explains this). The spirit of the time stands in contrast to spirit-time, like Newtonian matter stands in contrast to Einsteinian matter, which can affect the shape of space itself, and not just move within it. The history of spirit is the development of spirit-time, like the history of the universe, and mainly: the expansion of spirit-time.

Because although we forget how to think in certain ways, ancient ones, that is, we lose detail (close possibilities), we still spread to larger spaces of more different thinking possibilities (more distant from each other) - and this is the only sense of progress in spirit-time (and it is embedded in spirit-time like entropy in space-time or development in evolution). Because the only way to measure the distance we've come from the beginning is not to measure directly how far we've moved from the beginning, but how far we've moved from each other, after we started from the same (or close) place - how much our spiritual world has grown (exactly like the way to measure the age of the universe through its expansion).

Periods of intellectual big bang are periods of explosive expansion in spiritual possibilities (inflation), compared to periods of regression, and of reduction of possibilities (like in the Middle Ages, or in certain areas of Western spirit today of reduction of the spiritual space - because economic progress is not a guarantee of spiritual development, it can be the opposite, and the great example - Rome versus Greece). A great thinker is not because he is more correct compared to the past (it's not that Kant is more correct than his predecessors), but because he adds a sea of new possibilities, and the reason to write after him is not because these possibilities are suddenly good and correct from the old ones, but because it is the development and expansion of spirit-time (that is: there is more interest in them - a learning idea - and not more truth or meaning than the previous ones). Therefore the meaning of a new idea is not the progress of one step (because every idea is just one more step) but the opening of a new horizon.

It may be that possibilities cannot be judged in terms of their truth value (as postmodernism understood) but they can still be judged (as postmodernism was mistaken) according to their greatness, that is, their interest and fertility from here on: Wittgenstein is greater than Spinoza because he opened a larger world, not because he is smarter or more correct. And Wittgenstein is not more correct than Kant, and that is not the reason we moved from Kant to Wittgenstein, but because he opened a new world. If Kant had come after Wittgenstein, we would have moved from Wittgenstein to Kant just as we moved from Kant to Wittgenstein. This is the meaning of a period: not just becoming, not just power (politics), and not some artificial historical division, but a real division of periods of development in spirit-time. Events of expanding horizons (because in most ideas that are just a step, even when progressing one step you don't see further - the horizon of possibilities is the same horizon).

We can also look at it this way: Note that we could imagine all the history of philosophy reversed in the flow of time, as if the arrow of time reversed, but we could not necessarily imagine them in a different order - first Kant and then Aristotle and then Wittgenstein and then Plato. Thus we can also distinguish between philosophers necessary for development and possible philosophers. We could imagine Spinoza after Kant, that is, Kant could have come before Spinoza, and then Spinoza would have seemed somewhat outdated, but not impossible to imagine Kant without him. On the other hand if we reversed Kant and Wittgenstein, or Kant and Descartes, we would have to reverse all the development between them, to reverse the arrow of time itself. We can also always reverse any two consecutive philosophers, for example that Hegel, Marx's student, would come as a reaction to Marx's materialism and after him, or that the early and mature Wittgenstein would come after his disillusionment from the late and naive Wittgenstein, or that first there would be Aristotle and then Plato would rebel against him. But if we move central philosophers on the time axis - we need to move all the progress of time, the whole period. These are philosophers who move time itself. For example if the early Wittgenstein is later than the early, then Russell is later than Wittgenstein and Frege is later than Russell (and thus we can separate their significance as mathematicians, which is not reversible, from that as philosophers). That is, the replacement game allows us to find axes in philosophy and threads in philosophy, who is connected to whom and who pulls whom with him. This is philosophy as a network. Therefore Hegel could have appeared even before Kant, because he is "primary" in the network, but not Schopenhauer, after whom Nietzsche, etc., who are "duplicates" of Kant. Thus we see who is a duplicate of whom.


From the theory of relativity of learning to its quantum theory

And now, when removing the garments, spirit-time is not a basic phenomenon, but is created and developed from a more internal, subatomic process of learning, which happens in all the space of spirit-time, like evolution creates biological diversity. Evolution allows much more interesting and far-reaching changes (that is, creative innovative changes) precisely because it is built on a discrete "subatomic" language (that is, subcellular - the cell is the atom of biology) and not on continuous parameters. That is, precisely because it operates through tiny randomness and not continuous global change - precisely the digital and not the analog is more creative (because a change in one letter can create an unexpected change in the system - suddenly wings will be created, and not just a change in the parameter of leg circumference, say). That's how learning is more creative in finding new possibilities than adaptation, and therefore less predictable. If so: what is that learning? How does a "small" local change create a "big" global change?

Always in epistemology they ask about sensory data, in a kind of visual picture of the world, but to the same extent it was possible to ask and put at the center other cognitive functions, like attention and concentration. Because not only are we limited to sensory data, we are limited in our consciousness even much more, only to a narrow beam of attention and concentration from the world, and to a narrow beam of thought from all the huge spirit-time: the space of spiritual possibilities. We can think about only one thing at any given moment. Out of all our knowledge and our huge world of considerations: only one thing will be at the center, and only on it we can act and change. And this is not a technical problem, like in an old TV screen where an electron tube scans the entire screen from top to bottom - because we really cannot scan the world of possibilities of spirit-time in such a systematic way, and therefore we can act only very locally in our thought or perception.

Therefore only rarely will a change in a certain thought produce a global change in the space of possibilities, or cause a chain reaction that will create such a change - because the brain like any functioning biological system is conservative and not creative by nature, because life is the persistence of processes. And therefore only discrete, linguistic thinking can create real creativity, and this is the difference between us and animals. They also think, but only with parameters: more to the right, bigger, more dangerous, less tasty. We can write something different from anything written so far - a new possibility - and continue from there. And this is learning. Sometimes a local innovation in an issue suddenly changes the understanding of large parts of the Talmudic corpus, and allows forms of thinking we didn't see before - and thus the Talmudic universe expands, and this is the value of innovation (not being more correct than a previous interpretation, in a kind of sterile game of what is the correct law).


Why what really matters in philosophy is the mechanism and not the structure?

The computer and modern mathematics turn entire philosophers into equivalent representations of the same phenomenon, as if they tried to describe mathematics in words. For Spinoza the structure of the world is a manifold that has different sections, and for Leibniz the world is an infinite collection of points that create a maximal coherent system in space. That is, they are essentially homeomorphic - both can be different representations of the same object from two perspectives, because a mathematical manifold consists of infinite points. Beyond that, the computer turns epistemology, from the moment we created artificial cognition, into artificial. Only as long as cognition was human was it mysterious.

Mathematics is strong in turning rationalists into its description in words, and computer science is good at doing this to empiricists. Berkeley too is essentially homeomorphic to the most basic empiricism, if we just replace matter with God. That is, philosophical theories in which the structure is equivalent, and if we just replace the names we get the same thing, are in a modern mathematical conception equivalent, that is homeomorphic (by the way, Wittgenstein's family resemblance is just clustering in graph theory. Sometimes a philosopher makes considerable efforts to describe and prove something simple because it's difficult to describe a mathematical structure or algorithm in words).

Kant's innovation was not the idea but the mechanism. The idea that we have no direct access to the thing in itself exists even in Locke. But the mechanism with the mystical touch of the categories is the innovation. Hence the current importance of the learning mechanism - not in pointing to the limitations of language, but in presenting the mechanism behind it. The mechanism is something that is not homeomorphic to one of the theories (forms) in the field of multiple symmetries and reflections of the previous problem (in Kant's case: epistemology. In the case of the next Kant: philosophy of language). That is, the mechanism is a new structure, and even a new type of structure, or meta-structure, because it creates a new field (in which it is possible to copy all previous theories, and be Berkeley of the philosophy of language, Locke of language, Spinoza and Leibniz of language).

Today there is a return to metaphysics because there was no progress in the mechanism for learning (due to the conservatism that stems from the academization of the field), and since there is no progress and there is a desire for innovation then there is a return backwards (this is a dynamic that exists in many fields). Like someone who reached a wall and didn't find a way to progress and pass it, so he goes back to search from there - exactly like the depth-first search algorithm in a tree. Therefore the continuation of philosophical conservatism is a recipe for philosophical Middle Ages, that is, for a return to the past.


The Damage of Epistemology to the Masses

Every philosophy eventually reaches the masses, magnified and simplified, and then in discourse one can see its failures (even the philosophy of learning will eventually reach the masses). Therefore, the traces of Descartes - the heroism of overcoming doubt and French self-affirmation through "intellectual activity" (the cogito) - can be seen today on Facebook. And then we discover that opinions are the refuge of the idiot and truth is the refuge of the fool. Because the concepts of truth and knowledge, unlike the concepts of intelligence, learning innovation or creativity, are not an individual's capacity, and their prestige allows someone who knows (in their opinion) a certain truth (important!) narcissistic gain, which attracts people to "know" all sorts of things that are hidden (for some reason) from people smarter than them - and thus provides refuge for their sense of inferiority compared to those blind wise men. On the other hand, if the prestigious concept is intelligence, like processor power, or learning ability and creativity (all the elements that do not exist in Cartesian reason), then there is no refuge for the idiot and the fool in the correct opinion - and there is no opening for the arrogance of the donkeys who are right in their opinion (in their opinion) over the "mistaken" wise men.

It is precisely the sense of inferiority that causes fools and the masses to fall in love with their opinions - especially if the few wise men do not hold them, and this is the source of the magic and fanaticism of populism: knowledge. I know how to deal with Arabs. You are blind to the truth I have found. I know more than all the professors. This mechanism creates an essential tendency for error among the masses, even more than a random probability for the incorrect opinion, because the opinion will be contrary to wisdom (this is the epistemological paradox). But the source of the problem is not the concept of truth, but a more basic concept that conflicts with it: the self (the ego). That is, the source of the problem is the theory of cognition. It's not the truth itself, but that I know it.

The moment Cartesian philosophy emphasized the self - it created the type of the foolish ego. Cartesian doubt eventually embodied itself in "I and nothing else." I think therefore I am important. Democracy for its part has not stopped flattering opinion, because everyone must have knowledge. But the philosophy of learning will put an end to this. Because learning is learned only from the wisest, and only with them do new ideas occur. Because learning is anti-individualistic - because it does not occur in individuals but in the system.

One can also look at it this way: The system is the correct framework for understanding and conceptualizing learning - neurons do not learn but the brain learns. And the learning of society and culture and the state is a systemic phenomenon and not a personal one. The single genome of the organism in evolution does not learn but the species does. Learning transfers the center of gravity of meaning from the structure of an individual to the system, and even the individual is already perceived as a system, that is, not as an individual (= indivisible). I am not an autonomous atom but a whole culture of neurons or a whole species of ideas and thoughts - I am not a consolidated ego but a systemic framework of learning. This is a new conception of man that inherently contains less hubris, and in fact internalizes doubt deeply, beneath the self, and turns it into form rather than content. Doubt is not in knowledge, that is, it has no object of such and such content, but it is structured in the learning process as an unfinished process. It is not an operator that the self operates on an external object but it is the operator that operates the self itself - as a learning system. One does not cast doubt but doubt casts you. In fact, the same is true for knowledge itself. I do not know anything - I only learn. Knowledge is a process and not content.


The Damage of Epistemology to Scholars

Locke is the most boring philosopher in the history of philosophy, precisely because he is right - he is not interesting. From philosophy we seek strangeness, to amaze us and shake up common sense, not common sense. Therefore the history of philosophy is not a search for truth, but for the interesting. That is, for the opening for learning. To say that something is interesting means that there is room in it for learning to expand the spirit-time, that is, that there are unexploited possibilities in it. A discussion is exhausted not when someone is right and has won, but when there is no innovation in it and it does not expand the spirit-time. As a learning machine, man does not seek truth, but interest, and has no interest in answering again and again with a known truth. This is the real reason that the Middle Ages narrowed the human spirit. The central characteristic of death is boredom - and the central characteristic of vitality is interest.

In this sense even science, and certainly philosophy, are similar to literature. Boring literature cannot be saved by being true, and even on the contrary: the cliché is true, the kitsch is known. The central characteristic of mathematics is not eternal and closed truths but eternal interest and open problems. Precisely because it is an infinite learning challenge - hence its supreme validity. If mathematics were finite it would not be valuable. And if it really turns out that the ultimate and true and final laws of physics have been found - the theory of everything - this will be the end of physics as a field of interest, and within two or three generations it will become a banal truth (no matter how strange it may be).

Locke may have been an innovation for his time, but his banality made him a small and correct philosopher. And in contrast, the psychotic Spinoza inspires tremendous inspiration. This is the problem of secularism versus religion - the less logical is more interesting than the logical, and this is the intellectual version of the epistemological paradox that causes precisely distinguished learners to err greatly - and not to be right in small. Because a big mistake opens the spirit-time, and small correctness closes it. Do not be too right - why should you be desolate.


The General Relativity of Spirit-Time

And now, behold and see - the same Locke who is a dwarf among the great philosophers, if he had appeared in ancient times, he would have been the greatest giant in all the history of philosophy. That same Locke himself, if he had appeared after Aristotle (and there is no inconceivable leap between them, and even continuity in things critical to influence on history), which could have seemed in retrospect completely natural (even more than the appearance of Aristotle after Plato), he with the shoulders of his unbrilliant simple and somewhat skeptical empiricist - could have brought the scientific revolution already in ancient times, and therefore be the most important person who ever lived.

Anyone who does not believe in the power of ideas, and thinks that the great and significant factors in history are what is customary to see in it as history, should tremble at the thought of ancient Locke. Because Locke is exactly what was missing there. The problem was that Plato came from mathematics (this is clear), and Aristotle came from biology, and this was the factor that there was no scientific revolution - because there was no philosopher who came from physics. And therefore Aristotle took over physics with biological thinking, anti-mathematical (for example: purposeful explanations). If, as should have happened naturally, after the thesis of Plato and the antithesis of Aristotle, between mathematics and biology, a third philosopher had come, of synthesis, who connects mathematics and nature, and thus enables empirical physics, then the Greek world would have raised the scientific revolution on its shoulders, without all the huge detour through monotheism. And it would have seemed to us the most natural and logical, that philosophy necessarily and directly leads to enlightenment, without all the psychological complex that Judaism introduced to the West. And there would not have appeared within the West a foreign plant, complicating, Eastern, conflictual, mythical - namely the Jew.

One can also look at it this way: Plato, who came from the Pythagorean tradition, subordinated even the most material thing, the four elements of nature, to the mathematical logic of Platonic bodies. The physical derives from him from the mathematical order, in an absurd way that in our eyes can only appear mystical, but it simply follows from the belief that the correct direction of inference is from the mathematical idea to matter, which is not a sovereign realm. This is the opposite direction from empiricism, which worked in the scientific revolution in the direction from matter (observation/experiment) to the mathematical idea. Aristotle as an antithesis went from matter to concept, in a way that characterizes modern biology, which has not undergone mathematization. Because the concept for him was not mathematical. But if there had been a philosopher who had made a synthesis between them, that is, going in the Aristotelian direction, from matter, but reaching all the way to the other side to the Platonic, mathematical idea, then this is exactly the scientific revolution of creating mathematical laws of nature from physics.

If there had not been Aristotle, but only Plato, then it would have been possible to rebel against him, but their closeness caused that whoever rebelled against one was immediately thrown to the other and vice versa, without the third that would have allowed progress. Therefore even Locke was able to break this pattern. And what allows this? After all, people who think that ideas have no power - it's because they think about ideas. But what is important in philosophy (and in history) is not the ideas, but the methods. Methods have the tremendous power. Because they are ways of development, and not just milestones. And if Locke's method, or that of any other scientific philosopher, had leaked into the ancient world - then there would have been science there. And he would have been considered the greatest man in history. Because of the method - and not because of the worldview. The great forces in history are methods and ways of learning, and not some case like "Rome". Therefore philosophy is to blame for the Middle Ages - in its ideological failure.

Hence we see the most important property of the spirit-time: general relativity. Locke in our time - a dwarf. Locke versus Plato - a giant. But Plato - a giant. That is, it's not that the past necessarily seems smaller to us than the present, or vice versa, but that if we move a person back in time he will grow larger and larger, and vice versa. Because the size of a person is not objective, regardless of spirit-time, but on the contrary: his enlargement of the spirit-time is what creates his size, and in fact is invariant to it. One cannot separate a person's spirit from his influence on the spirit-time, and these are two different ways of looking at the same phenomenon: learning. The greatness of a person is as much as he is a method, that is, from him begins to develop a new learning that grows and grows. The greatness of a "great" is not some specific gravity, but the size of his curvature on the spirit-time: his learning size. A person who is just a new idea or even a new mechanism and not a new method - is not a great philosopher. And in contrast there is a giant philosopher who develops a method for creating methods - like Kant. All the importance of philosophy to history is precisely in its being a primary methodological factor, that is, a method of methods of methods.


Revolution: What Made Kant a Revolution and What Makes the Revolution Itself Revolutionary?

Kant is the philosopher of inversion, known for inverting the worldview (the Copernican revolution). But the source of the inversion was not a change in the worldview (which is basically a psychological change, which comes with the times). If anything, the psychological change is what enabled the inversion, but the source of the inversion was a logical inversion, as we see because the same mechanism repeats in epistemology and in ethics-religion (even in opposite directions), and even in aesthetics. And the logical inversion, the more technical one, which was seemingly available to any philosopher before him, is that Kant is the philosopher of "Indeed so!" (=yes indeed so as you said!) - turning the problem into the answer itself.

This is the most beautiful type of answer - according to Aristotle's Poetics - because there is nothing external outside the question. It does not rely on a new sensory datum in reality, which is the least beautiful excuse in the Talmudic hierarchy. It also does not rely on new legal knowledge - which is also a less beautiful excuse, which they labor to make more beautiful by presenting it as a new conception (and there is room here to expand and write about the aesthetics of Talmud study, as opposed to that of the Talmud itself, in which there was no such hierarchy). Because if you add a datum that was not in the question it is a less beautiful answer. And the cruder and more external the datum, that is, the more logical it is that it would create a change in the situation, the more the answer is considered ugly. A significant part of the work of the generations was to beautify the Talmud and the Torah, to their beauty today, through more beautiful literary and legal interpretation.

That is, if we return to Kant, before Kant the central aesthetics of philosophy was "let the law pierce the mountain" - taking an abstract conception to its most bizarre and least commonsensical consequences - and this is the beauty, and here is the pleasure of the intellect, the continuation of the line into regular logic and reality in such a way that it cuts them. And this is in contrast to the English aesthetics of cleanliness and cleaning, of finding a more beautiful approximation to common sense. Therefore English philosophy is aesthetically much less except in the eyes of the English. The English are, as is known, inferior painters and composers to the continental ones, because these are the two most structural arts (hence the word composition in both) - that is, they are bad at pure aesthetic form.

Kant is indeed extreme also in the aesthetics of let the law pierce the mountain (in pure abstraction), but all this only allows him to introduce a new aesthetic value to philosophy - an aesthetics of indeed so, which since he himself became a masterpiece, has become a new beauty and has been widely used (the later Wittgenstein as one example of someone who turned in his lifetime from let the law pierce the mountain - the central beauty of the Tractatus - to indeed so - the central beauty of the Investigations). Therefore after Kant there are constant inversions and revolutions in philosophy, and before Kant there were mighty structures in both schools - towering mountains of laws. Kant took the mountain and turned it into law, and therefore after Kant philosophy tries more to flatter reality, and wink at the reader beyond pure abstract thinking and say: here (and sometimes seemingly by chance) - reality also agrees.

Marx for example is an extreme example in squinting at reality, which became for him a permanent squint - that is, squinting as an ideology, and this is already a new philosophical aesthetics: an aesthetics of power. The philosopher as influencing reality. Here, see what power my thought has, what it does in the world, and what muscles I have! Unlike pure intellectual muscles ("let the law"). Democracy for its part has not stopped flattering opinion, because everyone must have knowledge. But the philosophy of learning will put an end to this. Because learning is learned only from the wisest, and only with them do new ideas occur. Because learning is anti-individualistic - because it does not occur in individuals but in the system.

In short, the Kantian inversion must be understood in its depth as an aesthetic inversion within philosophy itself in the question of what is beautiful - what is aspired to in philosophy. This is the depth of the revolution. The revolution in the conceptual-ontological-metaphysical worldview is only a product of the internal revolution in what is considered good philosophy. After all, if we imagine Kant in an earlier period what he did would have been considered ugly and as a cheap evasion of the problem (except that he took care to be beautiful also in the previous sense, like Rembrandt, who was beautiful also in the Caravaggio and Michelangelo sense before him, with biblical and mythological paintings, and also in the sense of self-portraits and individualistic-human-simple engagement after him, and thus smoothed the change and created a revolution in taste. And therefore there is a difference in the reading of Kant and Hegel between the veterans and the young, because each generation tastes a different taste in him).

The philosophy of the Middle Ages was the most "let the law pierce the mountain", and was capable of bending the mountain (reality) to absurdity in order to meet the requirements of the law (including inconsistency of the law itself), or even completely denying the mountain. And then gradually the mountain grew and intensified against the law (which is abstract thinking outside the imperfect mountainous reality), to the point of crisis in the law (from Descartes and the psychophysical problem - did anyone think of it as such a problem in the Middle Ages?). Kant is the moment when the mountain becomes stronger than the law - indeed. And Hegel is also very close to that moment (the mountain is the law and the law is the mountain, but suddenly the law changes according to the change of the mountain).


In what sense is Hegel more original than others?

Hegel is an anomaly in the history of philosophy. If we think of philosophers as organs in group theory, then Hegel is a prime philosopher, like a prime number, that is, one that does not organically arise from the development of philosophy necessarily, and is not a product or combination of several great philosophers before him, but something that suddenly appears. Another example is Plato, from whom all philosophy after him derives. Of course, one can find "prime numbers" outside of philosophy as well, which are ideas that are self-contained and original and did not necessarily stem from their predecessors, and therefore serve as atomic building blocks, from which many ideas can be composed. For example: in their application to another original idea, or even in the application of an idea to itself, that is, as its use as a method, as a function, on itself as an organ, that is, on its own contents. The monotheistic invention of Judaism for example is a prime number in the history of the Western spirit, and therefore they are engaged for a long time (all the Middle Ages) in various compositions or multiplications of it with various multiplications of Plato, for Aristotle is Plato multiplied by himself, that is, derived from the application of Plato to himself (Plato as an operator).

One can also look at it this way: The application of a philosopher to himself shows that it is not correct to think of a philosopher as a certain content, for there is no meaning to the application or combination of content with itself, from which we will get the same content, but as a method. He is not just an organ but also a function. Therefore, the same method created by the original philosopher, the creator of the method, and which he applied and received his ideas, can be continued to be applied again, a second time, after it has been internalized as a method (and not just as content), and to receive new ideas as a result. If the world of ideas worked in a continuous and geometric way, then the continuation of a philosopher would be to continue in the same directions he outlined, or to combine directions between philosophers, and this would be the progress after him - within the space the philosopher spread. This is also how many shallow historians analyze the history of ideas, as a collection of vectors, but it doesn't work that way in the history of the spirit (and not in history itself). The important continuations that are remembered for generations are not continuations, nuances or uninteresting extremes on the same axes, which only knowledgeable historians are familiar with. Philosophy does not progress on some "trends" or in "directions" that historians like to identify (and thereby affirm their mediocrity, for every philosopher becomes a kind of thought field of his days, with all kinds of similar possibilities on its sides). Because the valuable and interesting and innovative continuations of a philosopher are precisely not geometric continuations. The very fact that there are great philosophers, and not just points on continuums, stems from the fact that the progress of the spirit is algebraic, that is, discrete, in distinct stages and leaps, and not in axes and spaces, and this - because it is the application of methods. And therefore consists of their composition - like the composition of functions (or more precisely functionals).

Therefore, the inherent progress and internal natural development from a philosopher's doctrine is more similar to multiplying the philosopher with himself (applying him as a function twice, and then three times, and so on), than continuing on his line. A method can be applied a second time to itself and receive a new method and new products, and so a third time, etc., until degeneration. The degeneration of a method does not only stem from intensification on the same trend, or dilution of it in more and more trends until the loss of the distinct component, as in the historical view, but also from the fact that it itself gives too similar products in repeated self-application, compared to the first and second application that really created very distinct reactions. From Hegel came later the view of the second and third power as antithesis and synthesis, although not all methods work like this in self-application.

Synthesis in its methodical sense is precisely the composition of two different methods (two functions), for example multiplying a philosopher by a second philosopher, and it is completely different from philosophical synthesis created from combining contents, as in Žižek for example (it's hard to give an example from the past because we simply don't remember such philosophers). This is the reason that synthesis as an algebraic multiplication operation of methods can create a significant philosopher, as opposed to synthesis which is a geometric vector addition operation, which means an insignificant philosopher - no one will remember the name Žižek in a hundred years (Note to the reader from the future: laugh out loud, because this comment was considered provocative in real time!).

Hence there are completely independent methods, that is, prime in relation to each other, and they can be identified precisely when a philosopher cannot be considered as the application of previous methods again, or their combination. Then we will also say that from a conceptual-philosophical perspective of the history of spirit (not necessarily from a historical perspective) a prime method can appear before or after another prime method, because they have no necessary order one after the other that stems from development. This way we can separate the idea of originality from the idea of historical precedence which is accidental, and turn originality into a concept of the history of spirit, and not of the history of matter (who was born first). Historians think that the importance of a philosopher is in being the first to conceive a certain idea, but it is not the primacy in time - but the primacy in spirit: an original philosopher is a prime element. The students and followers and even the dissenters derive from the application of his prime method, not from some power of influence, "magical" and not really explained in the historical view, that he has on those who come after him. The phenomenon of the prime number is the reason why we see that historical importance stems from philosophical importance, and is not separate from it - in philosophy the first thinker of the idea and method is also almost always the most complete exemplar for their use, and not some more successful formulator who came after him (as in business or literature and art, where the conceiver of the idea and method is often not the most successful implementer). If primacy was only historical precedence in contents - then the first to propose an idea would usually not be the greatest philosopher who made use of it. But primacy is methodical, and whoever applies a prime method to the world receives from it a whole original world.


The Method as Self-Knowing - Liberation of the Method

What enables the composition of methods is the internalization of previous methods without internalizing the contents they created, meaning a second-order internalization of a previous philosopher. As an example for analysis of self-multiplication, Plato is not just the idea of transfer from the general in ideas to the particular in the world, but in a more abstract and methodical way, he is the very idea of creating a worldview through such a division between worlds, and of transfer from one side to the other. And when we continue to apply this method again, after it has been internalized as a method and not as content, we easily arrive at the reversal of the transfer, from the particulars to the general, meaning to Aristotle. In the same way, Judaism is not just a certain myth in the human world from a monotheistic god, but it is the methodical idea of creating a monotheistic myth, relevant to the human world from within God. Therefore, if we continue to apply the method, after it has been understood as a method, and not as specific content, we can create another and opposite stage of religious monotheism, not continuous, but of a new covenant, in which the myth in the human world enters as relevant into the world of God. And so on. Each such leap that is the continuity of the method (and not the continuity of content) is another self-multiplication, while a completely new method, which does not derive from the application of previous methods, is a prime element.

In other words, Paul's greatness was the internalization of Judaism as a method - and not in contents (and certainly not in the contents created by Christianity, which are incidental, sometimes to the point of ridicule). And then thanks to the method, this religious complex suddenly became a creative and sectarian religious laboratory, which later went on to degenerate. Therefore, it is not coincidental that Christianity appeared shortly after the destruction of the Temple (Jesus was just an excuse), because the destruction suddenly took away from Judaism its central content, and therefore distilled it as a method. The destruction of the internal content was also expressed in the Sages, who were more radical than Paul, because they understood that no specific content or myth would hold (unlike Kabbalah, they did not build an alternative Jewish myth). Therefore, they distilled the method into a pure learning ideology, in itself (learning for its own sake), and in fact the philosophy of learning is a multiplication of Torah study with philosophy, hence its potential to renew philosophy, which has degenerated in multiplying the philosophy of language with itself.

Hence also the degeneration of philosophy after Plato, because it had nothing to be multiplied and enriched with except itself, and then Stoicism is Plato cubed (Aristotelian virtues replace the Ideas) and to the fourth power and so on, and it converges towards an uninteresting direction. Just as the Middle Ages converged towards an uninteresting direction: Christianity was Judaism squared, the application of Judaism to itself, and Islam cubed, the application of Judaism to Christianity (cleansing monotheism of myth), and so on, and then at some point in the Middle Ages they begin to try to multiply Judaism with Hellenism, and this is the great revolution of the late Middle Ages - everything we know as Jewish thought and Christians know as scholasticism and Muslims are still stuck in it. Maimonides, for example, is a combination of Judaism with Aristotle (and therefore he is an original philosopher only in the realms of Judaism, and not outside it, because he did not internalize Aristotle as a method but as content).

And therefore after Hegel, as a very prime element, there is a philosophical explosion of Hegel squared (applying Hegel to himself - Marx), and of Hegel multiplied by all the rest (Hegel multiplied by Kant, more sophisticated than Marx - that's Nietzsche). Suddenly Hegel opens a new dimension in philosophy, time, as opposed to the dimension of space of the "worldview" that dominated before him. And the question is why did it take so long? Why wasn't there a Greek Hegel? And what caused the appearance of Hegel?

First of all, the progression of time itself, or more precisely its acceleration, which in Hegel's days was already felt very much how within a person's lifetime ideas change. In contrast, throughout the history of philosophy there was a strong aspiration and aesthetics of eternity, something that philosophy received from its very abstract nature, namely one that sits in the brain on the neurology of spatial vision (and therefore very masculine). Hence the cradle of philosophy in a squared male environment (namely homosexual), in contrast to the straight Judaism in which the dimension of time, more feminine and narrative, is present from the beginning, because in Judaism there was a coupling between time and its idea (monotheism). Judaism was historical and narrative monotheism, not abstract and philosophical and timeless, hence the idea of the Shekhinah of the feminine revelation of the male God in history through a specific nation. The world of Ideas and the world of matter are both male worlds for the Greeks, and therefore the one-sided relationships between them do not include fertilization and dwelling within and birth from within, in contrast to the relations between God and the Jewish world, which are straight relationships. And Hegel is already birth within the world of Ideas itself, and he is also very deep coupling and dwelling relations between Ideas and matter (the rational is the real and the real is the rational), and therefore it can be said that he invents lesbian relationships, when even the upper ideal world for him is a woman, and everything is subject to narrative time.

Hegel is the discoverer of the spirit-time, although for him it is more like a time-machine or more precisely a spirit-machine. The spirit for him is rigid as if it were a congealed solid, befitting a German. In any case, Hegel and Kant are the most abstract philosophers, and therefore the wisest, and Hegel is even worse than Kant in this sense. Heidegger and Husserl compete, and not coincidentally Germans, but the former is infected with mystical charlatanism, and the latter with scientific. Heidegger is already a kind of parody of the style, meaning he turned the style itself into the center, being the son of the century of language, and brought it to collapse.

It can perhaps be said that Hegel was created from Christianity, and therefore received the dimension of time as an inheritance from Judaism, meaning Hegel is a product like medieval: a multiplication of religion with the philosophy of his time. But still, there is no essential, conceptual reason why a medieval Hegel would not have been created (and indeed we can try to think of a few in that direction, also quite prime, meaning original in relation to the intellectual history before them: Ibn Khaldun, Machiavelli, perhaps Vico. Von Ranke arrives a little after Hegel, not coincidentally).

As a specific historical circumstance (and not as a cause), it can be said that Hegel was provoked by Kant's Enlightenment that conceived history as purposeful (as part of the category of purposefulness), and was created as an antithesis to it, but such historical conceptions were common throughout history, for example in eschatology and theodicy. The historical appearance of history itself - will always be from within itself.

In summary, history as intellectual history is an idea that arrived exceptionally late in intellectual history, and therefore one needs mainly to explain the opposite: why Hegel was so late, and not why Hegel appeared. What was the anti-Hegelian conceptual barrier? The obvious explanation is the timelessness of philosophy, which stems from abstraction from specific historical circumstances. Hence on the one hand its ability to expand to other periods and times, historically distant, and on the other hand its anti-temporality which is anti-learning.


In What Sense is Hegel Wiser than Others?

Wisdom is a kind of intellectual beauty. Unlike the more ontological-logical aspect of the intellect - reason, or the more computerized aspect - intelligence (processor speed), or the more mystical aspect - depth, or the more Jewish and playful aspect - creativity ("innovation"). These are thinking styles. And in the thinking style of who is most abstract - Hegel takes the prize. Heidegger is more mystical (tries to be deep). And the analytical philosophy of our days is a competition of who is more intelligent and manages to defeat the arguments of the opposing side - who is intellectually superior and has philosophical capital, like in the capitalism of philosophy. And this is in contrast to Continental philosophy which is a competition of who is deeper and more critical, namely manages to penetrate (and mainly to undermine, because to penetrate is still harder) underneath.

Wittgenstein is more Jewish of course: he has the ability to jump from game to game (early and late), and he likes to play in investigations and in the end there is also a language game. The Jew will always be more righteous than the Pope, and will formulate a crystalline philosophy in the beginning, like Spinoza, which hides the playful and charlatan-Jewish aspect. There are those who build gentile towers of eternal truths - the Jew in contrast plays with blocks. And then the Jew says to the gentiles: look what an eternal tower I built - in complete contrast to his true method. Because after all everything is a game, and even the pretense to a tower is part of the game. The Jew always plays in the sandbox of another culture, because his Talmudic culture is built as an intellectual game. One who has played endlessly with "ain hachi nami" and "yikov hadin et hahar" and turned it and turned it and all is in it, will never take the intellectual game completely seriously. He will only try to prove that he knows how to play it better than the gentile, and will even have the advantage - because it's just a game, and therefore more subject to manipulation, meaning, in the eyes of the gentile - manipulative.

Therefore Heidegger hates Jews so much: they stole his charlatanism. And they are enemies of his ridiculous "depth". They ridicule him and the German inflation, whose peak is in the self-perception so serious, to blood and death, of Nazism, which to Jews can only appear Charlie Chaplin-esque, and therefore they did not understand it in time. Because not only does the German not understand the Jew, but the Jew does not understand the German, and the fruitful encounter between them is an encounter of opposites, because at the extreme end of playfulness depth already appears, as in Jewish mysticism: the edge of the circle.

Hence the success of Jews in French philosophy in the twentieth century (the more charlatan). Husserl converted. In any case, if we return from Judaism to the essence of Judaism - its philosophical form - learning, then learning is, as a replacement for language, a multiplication of Wittgenstein by Hegel, namely adding the dimension of time to language (if we break down the minimal idea of learning into prime factors that cannot do without. But in a richer version of it - Kant can also enter the pot). And if we say that mathematically adding a time dimension to language was a Turing machine, meaning the computer, then learning, like machine learning, is adding a time dimension to the computer and software (meaning: creating a Jewish computer. The computer not as a structure - but as history). The learnable is the real and the rational, and the real and rational is learnable.


Talmud of Philosophy as an Alternative to the Development of Philosophy

What is the meaning of the Gemara's form of thinking for philosophy? Both deal with abstract thinking, but there is something much more accumulative in the Gemara, because it always adds possibilities (and understandings), and does not replace previous possibilities (cancel understandings). Meaning it's not just the interpretation responsible for the spirit-time of the Gemara growing continuously, but the encouragement of innovation within the paradigm - while for every philosopher it seems that from his point of view, meaning according to his method, he needs to be the last philosopher (a ridiculous matter. Each one - a paradigm!). In contrast, in a world where philosophy is perceived as a learning system, then every philosopher adds more possibilities, and there is accumulation - meaning philosophy begins not from proof, but from proof of possibility: it's possible to think also like this. It is required for non-contradiction, not necessarily for proof.

So what is the purpose of philosophy, if not "truth"? (which is a problem it has been stuck in for hundreds of years, and caused its reductive character: there are many philosophers who proposed an extremely reduced worldview, and not just because of abstraction and simplicity). In the Gemara this is called "chiddush" (with stress on the first syllable). A typical gentile philosopher does not think of his new philosophy as a "chiddush", meaning as a possible innovation, not necessary, in the sense of: I came to propose a new possibility in understanding the world, and not - I have reached the understanding of the world. The "chiddush" is from within a systemic, learning awareness of the history of philosophy, meaning it is of second order. And classical philosophy is of first order. The chiddush is in the form of the spirit-time, and gentile philosophy is in the material of the spirit-time (of course these presentations are equivalent according to the "general philosophical theory of relativity", but the method - is different).

There are few great philosophers - and all the rest are erased, because of the destructive nature of philosophy regarding its past. And this is in contrast to the Gemara and mathematics, where there is a huge number of people who contributed - and the accumulation is collective. Therefore the non-learning method in philosophy eliminated many interesting arguments and ideas, and philosophy seems to progress in leaps, between milestones between which are abysses. And each such stone says: everyone is wrong and only I am right (or is forced to say, so that they will listen to it). Hence the certain violence of philosophy (let the law pierce the mountain), and its state as a war of alpha males (there are no women in it).

One can also look at it this way: first-order philosophy deals with wars between males within the philosophical species who is right, while the Talmudic awareness, namely the learning (Gemara is learning in Aramaic) looks at the development of the species as a whole. Therefore it sees the quarrels from the perspective of mutations (chiddushim) and their success in the population. In the eyes of the philosopher the war is on the moves in the argument about the content, which is a first-order view, but in the eyes of one who examines learning in the system, in a second-order view, the argument is about methods, about modes of operation (which are encoded in genes). Therefore there is no "who is more correct" but: what are the possibilities that evolution has at all, what is possible at all in the living world. None of the males who argue comes and declares I am a chiddush, a mutation, a new competition style, and therefore I should be allowed to reproduce. But if the individuals looked at the species as a joint enterprise, like scholars look at the Torah or mathematicians at mathematics, then the whole field would be much less intellectually violent, and everything would be institutionalized around the custom of bringing a thing in the name of its sayer (which is common to mathematics and the Gemara). And the main thing - the evaluation criterion would move from the first-order male order of truth and justice, who is stronger in his arguments and pierces the mountain intellectually, to a more second-order female criterion, namely more aesthetic and soft: who is more beautiful, creative and interesting. Precision is not important - but the momentum of the move. Not the depth of the foundation - but the height of the aspiration. This is what will happen the moment the learning view takes over.

Indeed, even within the world of the Gemara there is the aesthetics of let the law pierce the mountain, as one of the aesthetics, but there are also several other aesthetics (and whoever wants to research the different aesthetics of Talmudic legal thought and its commentators has a lot of room to grow: what different ideals of beauty exist for a beautiful resolution or beautiful explanation in a sugya). The transition from the value of truth to the value of beauty, which happened by the way also in mathematics and art, will allow philosophy to be accumulative, because anyway its history is built of masterpieces, meaning very beautiful things. Philosophy in every period is always built on some self-deception of men all running to some place - because everyone was wrong until now, and now there the solution and truth are found.

In fact, philosophy began from dialogue with Socrates, meaning it could have developed into Gemara, but it did not remain long enough in the state of oral tradition, and the model of Aristotle against Plato became fixed, in contrast to the model of Plato versus Socrates, therefore patricide is the norm. But it could have been different. And this could have been if really all philosophy was written as footnotes to Plato. And then he would have been the Moses of philosophy and Aristotle would have been its Joshua. And Joshua to the elders, and elders to the prophets, and prophets handed it over to the men of the Great Assembly. What Aristotle should have done is write competing Socratic dialogues, as if he has a different tradition from Socrates, and maybe he actually wrote such and they were lost. The loss of Aristotle's writings is the greatest known intellectual loss in human history (also the Book of Jashar and the rest of the biblical library). In a normal world they would have turned Pompeii upside down in search of writings.


If the Philosophy of Language Started from Logic - the Philosophy of Learning Starts from Complexity Theory

Husserl is Kant squared (applying Kant to himself. And Schopenhauer is Kant multiplied by the square root of Kant), Heidegger is already Kant cubed, on the way to existentialism of Kant to the fourth power (and postmodernism of Kant to the fifth power) - meaning a very rapid flattening of Kant occurred. And the reason is that Kant exposed his own technique, the idea underneath it - of "ain hachi nami" - and therefore it was easy to make imitations of him, and then satires, and then parodies, and then pastiche. Hence there was in Kant a rise in the awareness of philosophy to itself - to what operates it. He declared that he made a revolution (this was the focus). While philosophers before him declared that they exposed the eternal truth - this was the focus (even when they made a revolution). Hence there was within Kant an awareness of the history of philosophy, and hence the beginning of Hegel.

Also in Kant's Enlightenment - its formulation within philosophy - there was a historical aspect (simplistic). And the moment the French Revolution arrived, then the complication of a counter-movement began, and hence the Hegelian folding of history is already a natural result, meaning it was necessary to experience the first crisis, historically (because there were many crises before that as well). And from here already began to twist the snake of historicization, in deeper and deeper internalization (Nietzsche for example), up to learning.

On the other hand, learning is also a mental ability. Mathematically, because of the basic computational truth of the universe (or at least of physics in the orders of magnitude of the human condition) which is: P!=NP, meaning, according to the mathematical state of man (or of any rational entity), the rational world will be divided into P and NP, with learning mediating between them. In a borrowed sense, P is the world of what we know how to solve, and NP is the world of what we know how to check the solution to. It is clear that NP contains P, but there are many things we know how to check the solution to but do not know how to solve (for example: finding mathematical proofs of reasonable length. It is easy to check the proof, but difficult to find it).

For our purposes, there is no meaning to classes higher than NP and containing it, because from a practical rational point of view they are all mediated by learning, and we will never have a full understanding of them. There also lies mathematics, which is beyond the ability of human intellect to understand (meaning control) in principle (and so is any computerized intellect, including artificial intelligence, meaning this is an epistemology that goes beyond the human condition. Post-human epistemology). The problem of proof in mathematics has no solution, except in specific cases - and therefore mathematics as a field is founded on ongoing learning (of more and more proofs). We will never have an efficient automatic machine that knows how to solve the problem of proof in mathematics and prove every correct theorem (even if it has a proof), but we will need to learn to prove theorems. The state of learning is eternal in mathematics and does not stem from this or that lack of knowledge. From this perspective, meaning from a philosophical epistemological perspective, mathematics has no solution except in particular cases, exactly like the halting problem.

Because an efficient solution is the mathematical meaning of understanding, that is, of an epistemological solution (as opposed to the existence of an ontological solution). We understand only what is in P (and understanding something new is equivalent to inserting it into P. For example, understanding a mathematical proof that will allow efficiently solving a set of problems). It is impossible to understand mathematics to its end, as a general solution, except in specific cases. For difficult problems like mathematics and the halting problem, ontological (and theological) importance is known more than epistemological, because epistemology stops at NP, and only ontology continues on to higher classes.

The halting problem, which Turing proved has no algorithmic solution, and problems even harder than it - which no computation and computer can solve in principle, in a mathematically proven way, despite the fact that they have a solution - are the ultimate example, that only God knows, meaning only an entity that is not computerized in principle (that no computer can simulate). In fact, the halting problem provides us with a definition of God and therefore proof of the possibility of His existence - meaning God has a mathematical definition (one who knows how to solve the halting problem, which of course has a solution - only that it lies in infinity). As a conclusion, Turing's importance to philosophy is no less than Frege's significance. Philosophy has digested mathematical logic for half a century, but has not yet begun to digest complexity (because of its academic fixation, and also because of its distancing from mathematics, and in this case the mathematical branch of computer science theory).

If we add this epistemological component to the philosophy of learning, we get that the philosophy of learning has a side that stems from Hegel, from time, and a side that stems from Kant, of cognition, and a side that stems from language, of the system. Because learning is in the system. There is no learning in itself (except perhaps philosophy, which is learning about learning: the method of methods). In general, learning is always within a system: Torah study. And language is the philosophical paradigm for "system" (this is in one sentence all of Wittgenstein: language is the system. And in the intersection of reality we deal only with this system, therefore we are inside it. Therefore there is no private language. Therefore it is autonomous and independent. Because it is the system. And this idea is common to both early and late Wittgenstein).

Therefore learning brings together the three streams, it is a multiplication of the first three prime elements of modern philosophy: Kant times Hegel times Wittgenstein. And in terms of Kant's tradition, Heidegger is the one who argued against Husserl that man is in P, in what he knows how to do (hammering), and not in NP. This can also be thought of as System 1 versus System 2 of Kahneman. And indeed in neuro the basic insight is how efficient sequences of actions/thoughts that we have practiced are deeply internalized in the brain and become automatic, fast and requiring no thought (=awareness of trial and error in attempting to solve a problem). Meaning they enter our P, analogous to our System 1 - and this is the learning process (in sleep, patterns we practiced during the day are fixed and connections that were activated in sequence are strengthened, and thus the automatic sequences move from learning to efficient doing). While System 2 in the brain is analogous to the NP class: it is everything that requires conscious checking and examination and an expensive search process in resources - what we do not "know".


The Learning Lacuna in Philosophy

That is - what Heidegger forgot is to ask how you learned to hammer. For example, if you made a mistake then you consciously correct yourself, and cause yourself to repeat it, until the correct way is fixed - like in piano practice - and then after a night's sleep and dreaming there will be a jump in your abilities. And this is true also for non-motor learning, for example thought or speech patterns, and in fact the brain copied the motor-spatial learning mechanism for the purpose of thought and even abstract learning.

In any case, the learning process occurs in dealing with NP through conscious examination, and this (Heidegger forgot) is what distinguishes humans. Learning is what gives us the longest brain maturation (20 years) in the animal world, and it is what defines us, it is what we are made of (from the lowest level of computability in the brain to culture: all fractal learning weaves) - learning is who we are. The patterns are just its product, waste. While you are hammering you are dreaming and thinking about philosophy and that is where learning takes place (suddenly ideas come to you). Meaning that is where what is interesting and important and elevated happens, and not in the stupid action of the hammer.

By the way, the belated internalization in philosophy of the idea of P versus NP would have also solved Searle's Chinese Room argument in an instant - since Searle's solution is exponential (to search in written Chinese tables whose size is exponential to the size of the input). Meaning - there is no real understanding here unless the algorithm of the room was in P (and that is not what Searle suggests). After all, if mathematical logic had such a dramatic influence on 20th century philosophy, why the ignoring of computational logic at the beginning of the 21st century? And from this ignoring also stems the ability of philosophy to ignore the most important phenomenon in computer science at the beginning of this century - computational learning.

And to Kant we will say: you claim that mathematics is a priori synthetic judgments, so how do you know how to prove even the Pythagorean theorem, not to mention all the rest of mathematics? Did you arrive at this knowledge by yourself, or did you learn it from others, who learned it in a process of dozens of generations? Even the most genius person in the world could not have arrived even at the proof of the Pythagorean theorem alone, if he had received the beginning of mathematics from zero. Not to mention more advanced proofs. There is no person - not even the greatest mathematical genius Archimedes - who can arrive at simple proofs in modern mathematics by himself from zero (it is inconceivable). This is an effort against NP (and higher), meaning it is an impossible effort for a human (but only for culture and over infinite time), and indeed Kant certainly could not prove any open mathematical conjecture in his time. So here is your lacuna, Mr. Kant. Beneath your knowledge lies learning, and the two important planes in the world are not phenomena and noumena, but their counterparts of our time: P and NP. There is the real problem, which is a completely principled limitation of your software (which is not hardware dependent!). In fact, the reason you are the first to think of your philosophy is precisely this: our inherent software limitation. Meaning learning is not only at the basis of cognition, but at the basis of philosophy as a field.


How Did German Philosophy Begin to Fall?

Heidegger has a goy's head. And a goy's philosophy. Of am ha'aretz [uneducated people] (peasants who never left the forests). As opposed to the philosophy of a Torah scholar in Kant for example. Or the philosophy of a prodigy in Wittgenstein. Or the philosophy of a Hasid in Nietzsche. Or the philosophy of a Lurianic Kabbalist in Spinoza for example (meaning the driest and most technical structure contains the greatest spirit and emotion - and there is no doubt that Spinoza was influenced by Lurianic Kabbalah). In short (and it was possible to continue) there are all kinds of aesthetic types of philosophers. But Heidegger is what a "goy's head" would arrive at if it had to distill the law from within the mountain.

Therefore the philosophical blockhead takes the lowest side of man, the conformist default, and tries from within it to offer redemption. And what a miserable, boring, inflated and simplistic redemption this is - forest clearing - compared to learning for example, meaning to do something truly creative, which is the redemption offered by the Torah: innovation! Meaning it has faith in innovation, including mystical innovation, as opposed to Heidegger's mythless mysticism (and if we only compare this to Nietzsche who really tried to write a new myth, although unfortunately he did not know the Zohar and therefore did not have the tools to do so. If Nietzsche had known the Zohar a new religion could have come out of him and he could have become Saint Nietzsche!).

In fact, the problem of philosophy began with the allegory of the cave - which of all the different neurological capacities of man reduced it to vision. The allegory of the cave leads in a straight line to Descartes' problem (who is trapped inside his own cave: man has become the cave), and from him to Kant (yes, it is really impossible to get out of the cave), and so on. Meaning the worldview of the psychophysical problem stems from the fact that half of our brain deals with vision, and therefore it is a picture that is very difficult to break free from.

So Heidegger says (and in another sense also pragmatism): there is a more important part in the brain - motor skills. And paints a partial picture (which is also difficult to break free from, because every such picture is correct: the picture of hammering, the picture of man peeking into the world from within himself). To the same extent Wittgenstein went for the linguistic parts of the brain, which are also central (and such a cross-section of the world can be made with internal logic). And Bergson is related to the internal clock and sense of smell, the intuitive in the senses (hence Proustian memory, or the Messiah who smells and judges according to the substance of things).

And it is also possible to imagine philosophies of other parts of the brain, which develop them in more detail. For example: a philosophy of short-term memory, or of working memory, or of long-term memory. Or a philosophy of the sex and mating and reproduction system, which is certainly different from hammering - let's hope even Heidegger would admit this (and here Kabbalah went in this direction). And there were also philosophies of pleasure and pain... but it would have been possible to make a philosophy of each of the neurotransmitters. And in particular a philosophy of interest, which was related to learning (a philosophy of dopamine). And Freud is perhaps a philosophy of the limbic system.

In short, every such philosophy cuts a partial picture of man, takes a certain area from within the brain or a cross-section of a system from within it. And if the brain was really just a collection of these areas - then there would be nothing to do. But the brain is not a collection of areas each specializing, like a collection of processors in some system (one graphics accelerator, one memory, internal clock that coordinates, etc.). And therefore we are not a collection of unrelated philosophies. There is a more basic and comprehensive brain mechanism, beneath everything else, and that is - learning.


Phenomenology of Learning

Learning is not only beneath everything, but also the highest activity in our intellectual world, and all our innovation is learning. The worldview is one of philosophy's methods to take control of us: it paints an abstract picture, we cooperate as observers (that is, understand - it's an instinct), and then after habit and repetition of the picture in guided imagination over and over again (philosophy is long, difficult and repetitive...) our thinking passes only through this picture - and it is impossible to break free from it (the walls of the bottle were erected around the fly). But is the Heideggerian activity really our typical state - the human condition?

If we are not inside a goy's head, then our typical state no less is to read a book or write. In fact that is what we are doing right now (and not hammering). So what is the phenomenology of reading a book? Frequent transition from flow to stopping and thinking, meaning learning. On the one hand it is P, something we know how to do, to read and understand language, and therefore it flows, and on the other hand every time there is something that is still outside P for us (meaning from our perspective still in NP, because we personally do not have an efficient algorithm for it) you stop and get stuck and think and understand, and so again and again transitions between System 1 and 2. And writing is a completely analogous and homeomorphic process to reading, to which the same description applies exactly, frequent transitions between flowing by itself to thinking and stopping. And what is the difference, then? All the difference is an external source versus an internal source.

So why is the enjoyment from the internal source greater, why do people like to write more than read? Because they have an ego, and people prefer to imagine their writer as themselves, as opposed to the writer as a stranger - following the epistemology they identify with the internal source, because they are secular. Although phenomenologically there is no real difference if the source is inside or outside, and who actually determines that the source in writing is inside (maybe it's the muse) and the source in reading is outside? After all, in contrast religious people identify more with the external source, with the Torah, and inside them is the evil inclination, and therefore they enjoy learning more.

Additionally (and this is a learning argument): what's nice about writing is that you can summon the creative moments in which you innovate as close, again and again, as opposed to reading, where you depend on the writer, who is usually much less creative, and more importantly: less interesting. Meaning his learning interest (interest) is not identical to your interest, usually (only tangential to it), and therefore it interests you only partially, as opposed to your learning, which is entirely in the direction of your interest. And indeed if you come to a text in which your learning interest is close to that of the writer you learn a lot from it - and are very drawn to read it. It interests you very much. But in an uninteresting text there is not less information, and it is not the amount of new information for you that determines (meaning it is not the amount of linguistic meaning that is important but the amount of learning meaning).

Only in the Talmud are the moments of encounter and stopping and thinking dense to exhaustion for you as a reader (and this is because you are trained to be a reader who is a learner. This is not reading a book but learning reading). But precisely because of this it is the most difficult text to read, because you are almost always stuck and not innovating. The Talmud is banging your head against the wall non-stop (this is its ideal as a text, hence its unbelievable brevity). In contrast in writing you can adjust the speed of writing to the speed of your creativity and innovation, and thus always be in an infinite learning state, on the border between what you know and what you don't. Thus you can tune it without learning frustration and without boredom, meaning this is the pure learning state (which you will only rarely encounter in reading, it will always be too difficult or too easy). And since learning is the most basic interest of the brain, therefore you are drawn to writing more than reading, not because you learn less but because you learn more. And indeed the moment your learning from within yourself is finished you are again drawn more to reading.

Phenomenologically, in the Zohar it is much easier to innovate, because of its associative nature (the nuances in the Zohar) and non-logical like in the Talmud. Meaning if the Talmud is on the threshold of maximum frustration, like mathematics, on the threshold of your NP (meaning - what you don't know how to do, but know how to check if you succeeded), the Zohar is on the threshold of absolute lack of frustration, meaning on the threshold of writing. Where the paradigmatic example of this is the Ra'aya Mehemna, and writing in its style, in free thinking without boundaries as in a dream. Association is level 0 of the brain, really linear complexity, simply walking in the network (in the "graph", in mathematical jargon), and this is without controllers and everything required for higher loops. And if we only compare to the rigid German mysticism of Heidegger we will understand the difference between creative myth and conformist myth.


The Autoimmune Disease of German Philosophy

But there is one thing in which this rotten carcass Heidegger was right and that is the centrality of technology and the technologization of man (the smartphone as a hammer). What he did not understand is that the smartphone is Jewish text and information technology, and not power technology like the German hammer, and the network is the realization of the later Wittgenstein (a system that everything is inside it). And therefore the use of the smartphone is phenomenologically similar to writing and reading. Lots of choice, lots of intellectual activity. And this would really have driven him crazy. Because the most common human action in our era is entirely in the conscious field. There is nothing automatic on the user's side in operating a computer, and the computer has taken upon itself all the automaticity. The computer is the conformist and industrial German who is in being-there, and the one typing on it is the creative and cheeky Jew. The Nazi is the slave of global Judaism.

Heidegger's fear of technology is a German fear, of a nation characterized by efficiency and not creativity, and therefore he is afraid of efficiency as an end in itself, and here in the end creativity as an end in itself won (NP will always defeat P). And indeed the Germans even today are terrible at startups, and good mainly for industry, and therefore when they murdered the Jews they were doomed to gradually degenerate in the post-industrial era, or to be in the working class of the world. And even today this is the mass of the German public: efficient, rich - but essentially obedient slaves (with outbursts of psychosis that erupt from beneath the anality).

Excess creativity is also a problem, but it is a different problem, a problem in learning. Because the German-Jewish balance was disrupted and the two components of learning separated on their way. Heidegger is the philosopher of German provincialism, and because of him philosophy in German declined, which was the most important in the world - and therefore philosophy declined. There are people, like Heidegger and Hitler, whose historical greatness is in their destructiveness, and indeed Heidegger is the Hitler of philosophy: a slave who reigns - he still reigns like a slave. And leaves behind destruction and severe contraction in spirit-time (and complete academization of the field - a clear sign of death and mummification).

If so, what allowed Heidegger to destroy? The malignant and impure criticism, seeking to destroy the most basic foundations of philosophy. Meaning destruction of the past, "clearing the ground" with a bulldozer - and then it becomes an aesthetics of destruction (after all he is a Nazi): an end in itself. Meaning this is destruction with a Holocaust aesthetic, cleansing and extermination, and this is in contrast to learning criticism that reorganizes things. After all, Wittgenstein too, the great philosopher of the 20th century, was critical. So what is the difference between criticism that opens and criticism that closes?

The aesthetics. Wittgenstein did not bequeath an aesthetics of destruction but of building, both times. Because Wittgenstein's criticism was from within a new learning world, language (the criticism was a product of creativity), while Heidegger's criticism was within a German tradition towards itself (and creativity was the product of criticism. And he was also quite opportunistic and made a turn etc., but the violence in the personality remained).

Learning is non-critical philosophy, it does not care at all to destroy what came before it, or even to discover its unfounded basis and show its limitations, but only to add a dimension - to expand the spirit-time in depth in time - and to add to philosophy the future as a dimension. Every philosophy is composed of a critical part that negates previous philosophies and a positive constructive part, and learning is negative only against criticism - criticism of criticism. There is no need to destroy in order to build, or to dig into the limitations of the past in order to find a place to distinguish oneself, because we simply add a neighborhood (or preferably - a layer) in spirit-time. And this is in contrast to philosophy of the critical type that the more it destroyed what came before it feels stronger and more significant - more aesthetic.

The Torah, in contrast even to science, has never contracted, but only expanded throughout all generations. It does not know what destruction means, and this is what gives tradition power: the stock market of ideas always rises (times of distress and crisis are when it rises less). And this is like how a wise person never becomes more stupid. Sometimes he suffers from stagnation. But it is rare for a healthy person to become more stupid (for decades until his old age), and even old age itself is essentially wisdom (minus brain degeneration, which is a hardware problem, not software. The software is built so that you will be wiser).

Humanity too has only become wiser since its beginning. Criticism is needed only when there is degeneration and stopping of creativity and therefore of learning (the Middle Ages). But learning includes creativity within itself, and opposes non-learning destruction (and therefore also not creative). The paradigm of such destruction is the Holocaust. Therefore learning can be a philosophy that says I am beneath everything (meaning I am the most important) without destroying everything (as is customary in "great" philosophy) - but raising everything. It simply says: you didn't notice but I was there all along (and not - everything you did was a mistake because it was built on foundations that are not me). In any case, if you haven't noticed, learning is the common basis of both the universe and man - and therefore they have a common basis: long-term organizational learning development. In this learning responds to philosophy on the problem of epistemology: knowledge stems from learning.

One can also look at it this way: Learning is the true basis of being. One could (if desired) propose a complete phenomenological analysis of being from learning and its characteristics (known in Nathanian thought as the four principles of learning). For example: existence as existence "within learning" (within the learning system), or the unidirectional existence stemming from learning orientation and its partiality, or the immanent sexual existence of learning stemming from the tension between creativity and evaluation. But there is no real interest in this - regarding Heidegger, one must fulfill the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek, because he tried to return all the history of philosophy to a state of gestation, to the question of primitive being and the pre-Socratic state - and to erase it, just as the Nazis tried to erase the Jews. Therefore, he is not at all worthy of being considered a philosopher but rather a mystic of the Nazi religion (hence the esotericism), and he should be reduced to a hammer head. He is both a charlatan and inflated (the least successful combination), and this is what really distinguishes him from the pre-Socratics - who were not inflated. His inflation is what separated him from being (which is far from inflation), and certainly from authenticity.

Essentially, the question of being is simply a trivial question, and the attempt to find depth in it is mysticism and not philosophy, and not mysticism of the Kabbalistic-learning type full of interest, but of the nullifying type. The aspiration for some kind of ontological zero point and clearing space for living is exactly the instinct of the final solution (suddenly philosophy intervenes in being itself, and implements its extreme and merciless purism in it). The only reason Heidegger failed to solve such a trivial question as this is that the interesting answer to the question of being is a supremely Jewish answer: Learning is what constitutes being, and therefore it is also what constitutes philosophy, the moment it separated from the pre-Socratic mystical question and became philosophy, meaning a long chain of learning. Learning is what constitutes interest and the interesting - and Heidegger is, after all, the enemy of learning. Therefore, he is not really interesting. Only the bad taste he injected into philosophy allows thought like his at all, for Heidegger is absolute kitsch, and he is perhaps the least authentic person in the history of philosophy - and kitsch leads to death just as the mystical leads to emptiness. Just as Nazism is a warning sign in political science - what to beware of, so Heidegger is a warning sign in philosophy - what to stay away from. Indeed, one must forget being - and forget Heidegger. Being was a kind of mystical substrate that allowed him to babble. A concept that is everything is an empty concept. Heidegger's true philosophical legacy is New Age.


Learning as the Rehabilitation of Philosophy

Why are there no great Russian philosophers? Because the further east you go, thought becomes more mystical, for example if we take Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and all their Orthodox mysticism. And from too much mysticism it's no longer philosophy - it's the Far East. On the other hand, pragmatism is empiricism squared because Americans are English squared. This is going too far west - that is, to the scientific-mathematical-commonsense side.

Analytic philosophy, for example, is common sense masquerading as philosophy - ultimately it is not built on finding new and deep or creative paradigms, but on convincing Englishmen like you with your English logic, when everyone thinks in completely non-philosophical logic arguments of "seems convincing/strong/weak/certain/clear to me". The aesthetics are of logic and mathematics, but what's really behind the logic? Not mathematics of course, but common sense. All this creates countless discussions destined for the intellectual trash can, like medieval scholasticism (because internal sectarian discourse is "professional").

If analytic philosophy doesn't come to its senses and summarize its convoluted discussions in one canonical Talmud-like book - nothing will remain of it for the future spirit-time. So far, despite the enormous resources relative to the history of philosophy, not a single masterpiece has been created in it that will survive for generations, or that will speak to people of spirit, and its influence even in our time outside its walls is negligible, unlike any other philosophy. It doesn't provide inspiration, and that's what happens when you exaggerate too much westward. And there's no need to elaborate on Eastern mysticism either, because vague inspiration is the only thing it provides.

From all this it follows that great philosophy, as a field between mysticism and science, is found in the geographical center: Germany, Austria, Greece (between the mystical Persians and the future Romans), and also among the Jews (who are everywhere), and also France (Derrida as Wittgenstein squared). Why are there no great Italian and Spanish philosophers? Because the south is too sensual, and opposed to abstract thinking (they are good at painting). Today the center of programming is at the far far west (Silicon Valley), because programming is like the pragmatism of mathematics (applied mathematics squared), and technology is the pragmatism of science. Therefore, the crisis of Germany is the crisis of the entire field - of all philosophy. Language came from Wittgenstein with the Jewish instinct of existence within language (the later Heidegger only tried to imitate) - but has already exhausted itself. Therefore, we now need to inject a new Jewish idea into philosophy - learning. And replace the linguistic turn with the learning turn.


What is Learning? And Why is This Not a Question of Epistemology?

What good metaphor do we have for learning, like the picture, language game, and tools (in Wittgenstein, as metaphors for language)? The Torah (and Talmud) are metaphors that are understood only by Jews. A good metaphor for learning is mathematics as a field, as a system (not the mathematician learning, but mathematics learning), only that proof is replaced by other evaluation criteria (for example: what a woman values, what literary critics value, what people are willing to pay money for, what firing pattern of neurons others imitate, what survives in evolution, testing a hypothesis in a scientific experiment, and so on).

But from the Wittgensteinian experience we need other, more material images (the brain as a learning system?). People like some simple metaphor, simplistic analogy, because then they feel they've understood something abstract (although it's of course the most concrete). For example: Kant - glasses. Schopenhauer - black medium (beneath all existence). Hegel - thesis, antithesis and synthesis (as the holy trinity). Nietzsche - (was smart enough to create for himself) Zarathustra. Plato - the cave, the triangle (in the world of ideas). Aristotle - the biologist. Learning has an additional image problem, that it also needs to deal with an incorrect image of it (which flattens it to triviality and epistemology): learning in school, learning as inputting information into the individual, namely learning knowledge as knowing. In other words, it needs to deal with the secular image of learning.

A more correct image is a mathematical image: there are problems in P, things we already know how to do and solve and understand (only an efficient solution is understanding) - familiar procedures. Around the P known to us there is a much wider world of problems where we can evaluate or check our solutions to them, which we'll call NP. And transferring problems from the NP world to the P world is learning (or more mathematically: discovering that a problem is in P, or that part of a problem is in P). And this is mostly done through creative combination of several previous solutions in P, so that the jump is small - and in fact it's continuous learning (like tree growth). And then the evaluation function, not the creativity function, is what determines the essence of the learning field: empirical learning will be when the test for a solution is a sequence of data in experiments. And in cultural learning then time is the final judge (although there are interim judges).

But all this is a bit of an empty and trivial image and not very aesthetic, and also relies on another and too esoteric field of knowledge, and additionally it doesn't show learning enough as something that happens within a system (for example: multi-agent. Not something of one agent learning as an atom, as in the Kantian picture, but a system that learns, as in the Wittgensteinian picture of the language system). Only such pictures in the history of philosophy were accepted as beautiful ultimate understanding: X is like an object. Because this is the simplest thing, easy for the brain to remember and understand: a picture of an object (note that the considerations in philosophical learning are aesthetic!). So what is learning?

Above all: Learning is a phenomenon of system development. Like the economy, technology, science or literature - or even the internet. Like them it develops over time, and not only develops but improves. And it has evaluation mechanisms and opposing innovation mechanisms, the result of which over time is achievements that are not in doubt - masterpieces, breakthroughs, geniuses. And it has a large number of agents (in the brain - neurons). In short - it is a systemic phenomenon that occurs within systems with certain characteristics (the solar system is not a learning system). What enables its improvement is the phenomenon of building: innovation is built on previous innovations, and therefore improvement occurs. This is not building with blocks and Lego, but improvement like in a genome or software (which makes use of previous procedures), or for example in neurons that make use of previous circuits. The improvement does not stem from some final goal (like freedom in Hegel for example), but from dynamics intrinsic to the system (just as evolution has no final goal). Therefore each of these systems (and many others) can serve as a metaphor for learning, but what is correct is precisely what is common to them. The analogy between them - is learning.


Properties of Learning: Innovation is Freedom

Hence learning is inherently open and can develop in different directions (this will be called freedom!), as in all these systems. Unlike learning material in school - this is learning of spirit. The deeper and more far-reaching the learning in a certain system in its abilities - that is, capable of reaching refinement and masterpiece achievements that are difficult to create like the Bible, set theory and Critique of Pure Reason - the higher its learning ability. There is no such thing as intelligence or reason, only higher or lower learning ability. Therefore there is no point in artificial separation between the learning ability a person has and the learning abilities of human culture or other human systems. Philosophy itself as a system has learning ability, as do economics, literature and science. Therefore the view that sees spirit and reason only in man and does not see it within these systems is chauvinistic (humanistic chauvinism). In fact, these systems have institutionalized learning that is far higher in its abilities than any person - and in this sense the Torah is certainly superhuman. Consciousness is simply the learning of the self, and free will is simply the freedom in learning to develop in different directions. From here we see that learning is the dwelling place of freedom. Freedom is created from learning, and a choice that has no learning in it is not free, but arbitrary or random.

Our hatred for slavery in school and other educational institutions stems from the fact that it's not about learning - but about memorization and indoctrination masquerading as learning. We hate studies because we love to learn, but are trapped in an incorrect philosophical picture of learning, which creates fake learning institutions. And this includes the "advanced" idea of learning skills/tools and "learning to learn", as if learning can be outside a specific system - there is no such thing as pure learning outside the systemic context. And therefore it's also difficult to define it as a phenomenon. It is internal system dynamics. The second postulate of learning - out of four rules formulated by the Netanya school - is that: "Learning is within the system" (this doesn't mean the system is disconnected from what happens outside, but that learning is within it, and we examine it from an internal point of view - like learning is within the brain, although it is connected to the world). And since learning is systemic, meaning a complex developmental phenomenon, the form of metaphor to a noun that is beautiful for the philosophy of language, and Wittgenstein made beautiful use of it, is too simple and not dynamic enough for it - and therefore it turns to analogies, which are more learning-like in their logic, to complete learning systems.

Therefore if you learned (yes you too are a system, for example your brain, this is a post-neuro view of man) - well - if you learned by heart all the P procedures known in a certain field, like a parrot, you haven't learned, and only research is learning (meaning only if you learned to use P to create and discover new P's). That is: to learn a field is to learn its method (as a system). To learn an algorithm from P is to learn to use it for learning, just as learning a proof in mathematics is not learning to regurgitate it in an exam, but learning to use it for new proofs - and learning a writer is learning to write like him (or, if that's too difficult: learning from him how to write). And in another formulation: to learn a field is to learn to innovate in it (and not to know it) - to learn Talmud is to learn to innovate in it. To learn physics is to learn to be creative in physics - to learn to be a physicist, and not to know what physics said (as if there is such a thing at all in any field). To learn a language is to learn to be creative in the language and to speak and create in it. Freedom here is not that one will innovate (like most freedoms in the history of philosophy) - it is real innovation.

Of course, freedom has no value without evaluation, meaning evaluation mechanisms that evaluate it, because only innovation that has received evaluation is part of learning. Therefore freedom is not enough for a person within a bad system, and also a system that has no proper feedback is oppressive (Facebook. And an example of an evaluation system that worked not badly in the past: Google on websites). And therefore contemporary art is actually not innovative and not creative - because its evaluation mechanisms have collapsed, so there is no value and there is learning-like loss of direction. A creative explosion has meaning of a learning explosion and enlargement of spirit-time only if it has value in a functioning learning system, and hence perhaps the word system. In short: Learning is created in the dialectic between innovation and evaluation, which occurs in the space between P and NP.


The Future of Learning: From Learning of Philosophy to Philosophy of Learning - and Back

One of the reasons that philosophy is destructive about its past is that destructive books succeed - because they allow young people not to read and not to know its tradition, and to start philosophizing right away after reading 3 books (that say everything before them is nonsense). Thus destructiveness almost became a tradition. But in learning there is tradition, and therefore it is not destructive and does not come to negate the past. It does put it and itself at a certain distance from maximum seriousness (and from inflation and pride that characterize philosophers), out of awareness that everything is developing possibilities, and it too is not final, and the moment it clarifies the importance of learning to the point of boredom and becomes obvious - there will be new innovations.

Therefore, as learners, on the one hand we must learn the exemplary examples of the past, in order to understand what operators there are in the history of philosophy that produce new philosophy from previous philosophy. Every philosopher is not only a new doctrine, but also an operator that produces from a previous doctrine (or doctrines) a new doctrine, and the most important are those who are new and original operators, and not just an original doctrine. A simple operator is to take a component from a previous philosopher and intensify it, or reverse it (more interesting), or combine two philosophers. The Kantian operator is even deeper and more interesting - "all the more so". And so on. We must learn how to produce philosophies.

But more than that, since these are exemplary examples, then every important example can be not only an operator, but also a new aesthetic, meaning a new evaluation of what is considered good in philosophical learning (meaning a change not only in the method of innovation itself but also in its evaluation method - both sides of learning). The evaluation in philosophy is similar to literature: it is determined anew each time, especially by the last step - the literary critics are those who read and loved the latest new literature created, and they are looking for this excitement again, although of course they don't want imitators, because they will not arouse the excitement, but deep imitators. They want someone exciting like the ex, not similar to the ex, who will no longer excite them. Therefore learners look to the past, but not as orthodoxy, and not necessarily as a source of knowledge itself, but as a source of learning knowledge. Learning also produces learning aesthetics.

On the other hand, as learners, we need to look forward after us and open the place for the next innovations. First of all in developing the "learning turn", and using it in all branches of philosophy and thought outside it (as was done in the linguistic turn). And more than that, as learners we are not exempt from pointing to promising directions in philosophy for the next generation, beyond learning. For example, as innovators, after learning is deeply internalized, we will need to deal deeply with the innovation within it: with creativity and exemplary innovation (as opposed to just innovation). What is creativity really? What is exemplariness? And this, after we answer in depth: "What is learning". The idea of intelligence (understanding) is also an interesting idea. And perhaps the time will ripen to deal with it with the progress towards superhuman intelligence. That is, there is a possibility here to deal precisely with the highest and most difficult and special things, for example to deal with genius, and not just with things that are beneath everything, like language and learning - but with what is above all. This will be an ironic return to the aesthetics of religious philosophy.


Appendix: Demonstration of Learning for Philosophy of History

Historical thinking: History is not a collection of random events and external factors, or conversely, having an internal deterministic direction, but in the middle - a learning system. As a first approximation one can think of history as evolution - there are directions of development, but there is no necessary final goal, and it's also not a random collection of mutations. As a second approximation one can think of history as a market - there is development, but it is chaotic and unpredictable, certainly not in the short term, because of the players' awareness of the past - everyone is learning from history all the time, and therefore one cannot learn from history, meaning one cannot over time learn like the historical system itself - from itself. The wisdom of the market (or history) is much greater than any player.

Market economy is evolution aware of itself - with meta considerations and meta-mutations. And history is economy aware of itself - because it also contains considerations not economic at all, meta considerations above economics, because if economics is sophisticated learning for money - history already deals with life itself, and therefore learning is much more competitive and cruel and tight - and the invisible hand much more invisible. Therefore we need to expose the learning mechanisms of history from history - and this is the role of historians. People have always learned from the past, or from other sources, but they learned in different ways, and the basic variable in history, which needs to be exposed, is the change in these learning ways:

How in the Middle Ages was there religious learning, for example, while in Rome there was imperial learning, and in Greece democratic learning? And what is the difference between Muslim learning from history and Christian and Jewish learning? Or what is the difference between American learning and Russian or Chinese learning? And what learning disability - methodological failures - did Nazism or Communism have that made them what they were? These are questions of the science of history in the age of learning, and therefore its answers are different from the science of history in the age of language, which dealt for example with discourse in different historical periods, and its highest expression: history of ideas - how a concept is born and changes its meaning. And now should come: history of learning mechanisms - how learning occurs in different periods, and in different cultures. History of methods.
Philosophy of the Future