An Essay on Learning

A brief presentation of the philosophy of learning - as the heir to the philosophy of language. Why is learning a paradigm? And why is learning not just a paradigm and not mainly a paradigm, and in fact poses a radical alternative perpendicular to paradigmatic thought, replacing it with learning-based thought? On the difference between a scholar [Talmid Chacham] and a lover of wisdom, which is like the gap between the Talmud and philosophy. This paradigmatic gap indeed established philosophy as the domain of wisdom, but steered it far from "learning-ness", with only today allowing the synthesis between wisdom and learning

The paradigm of paradigm shift undergoes a paradigm shift  (source)

The philosophy of learning is a paradigm in the history of philosophy, just like the philosophy of language, epistemology, medieval theology (philosophy of religion is a misleading name), or ontology in ancient times. Therefore, the transition from language to learning is a paradigmatic shift - which characterizes the turn of the centuries: the transition from the 20th century, the century of language, to the 21st century, the century of learning. What turns certain philosophies into all-encompassing paradigms, and others - like pragmatism or phenomenology - into currents, and others - like aesthetics and political theory - into fields? Is it just a matter of success and centrality, including influence on other fields (for example in the humanities, culture and arts), or is there a fundamental-conceptual difference (within philosophy) that turns a philosophy into a paradigm?

On the surface, the main difference is in the worldview. It is possible, for example, to develop from the philosophy of mind the philosophy of thinking, roughly as phenomenology developed from Kant, or the philosophy of language (particularly analytic) from Wittgenstein, that is, by giving more secondary place to fundamental questions - and dealing with details. For example: how does thinking work? What types of thinking are there? All this while attempting to map different forms of thinking, assuming that everything is as it appears in thought. The method here is to derive one relevant plane from reality - in this case, thinking - and look at everything within it and from it (after all, who would deny that everything is thought? That there is nothing outside of thinking? That thinking is the basis for everything and beneath everything - well, thought? This last question already shows the enclosure within the picture of thinking).

Thus, it is possible to derive other planes of reality, turn them into the appearance of everything, and create from them an interesting and useful philosophy. There is importance in choosing interesting, rich and suggestive planes. Another plane that can be chosen, more external and social (like language), is - law. Here the Gemara [Talmudic discourse] comes to our aid, as an all-encompassing legal system, as a kind of example of legal thinking about the world. From here we can begin to identify legal systems that encompass every phenomenon in the world, characterized, driven and validated by their legal side. Even language itself can be perceived as a legal system, as well as science, economics, social conventions, or any field of knowledge. There are always judges, sanctions, law (written and oral), decisions, discussions, and institutions with a legal essence (that is, organizational and procedural) - a vast array of legal systems that are our entire world (even in thought there is an internal legal system for a person, which judges his thoughts and passes them through thought procedures and decides, etc.). The moment we look at the legal side of any system as a closed system - we can see that every determination is ultimately a legal determination, including scientific knowledge, and every process is essentially a legal procedure. That is - it is possible to turn law too into a closed system (as Wittgenstein did to language). And then it is possible to create an entire school that classifies and maps all the legal systems in the world and reads all the phenomena of the world through legal thinking (a kind of philosophical version of Halacha [Jewish law]).

That is, exactly the same trick we did with language or with knowledge, in philosophy's past, can be done with a variety of cross-sections of reality, and derive a philosophy from each of them. Although the philosophy of soap (everything as it relates to soap matters as the only relevant plane) will not be interesting - but it will be valid. Nietzsche did a similar thought experiment with sleep (in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"), but if we take dreaming we can demonstrate this again: if we assume that dreaming is the only important plane of reality, then everything in the world that happens during the day is important and meaningful only in its appearance in dreams. A certain knowledge is valid because I dreamed it - and this is a completely valid philosophy (if I dreamed it of course), and also completely contained within itself. That is - incomparable to others. The only valid comparison is that it is not as fruitful as previous ones and not interesting - that is, from a learning perspective it is inferior to the philosophy of thought and law for example, or to the philosophy of language.

If so, a paradigmatic philosophical theory in the history of philosophy, as opposed to an ordinary philosophical theory, is not any philosophy that can serve as an ideological paradigm (a kind of axiom system without contradiction and inclusive). This is only a first and necessary requirement of it. Many philosophical systems can be paradigms for the world - but not a new paradigm in the history of philosophy - if we only radicalize them and turn them into such, that is: if we use the method of deriving the relevant plane from reality (and everything outside it is irrelevant). Thus, for example, Descartes did with the "I" as the relevant plane, and cut out everything that is not within the self, thereby founding epistemology. Kant, on the other hand, did not create a new paradigm, but was the greatest and purest formulator of Descartes' paradigm, and who cut it in the most incisive way out of reality (Aristotle was also the great formulator of Plato's paradigm - he disagreed with him within the paradigm).

What turns a philosophy into a philosophical paradigm is its ability to contain (and fertilize from within it) other philosophies that are still in the same paradigm. Descartes' paradigm can contain Kant within it (not because Kant does not disagree with Descartes. In fact, Kant as a philosopher is certainly greater than Descartes). Plato's paradigm can contain Aristotle within it. And Wittgenstein's paradigm contains within it all the philosophies that simply derive a system from reality, as he derived the language system. The philosophies of law, thought, dreaming or soap - are all Wittgensteinian philosophies, although they disagree with him and have no essential role for language, because they are built on a more basic apparatus in Wittgenstein than language - they are built on defining the system and cutting it as a relevant plane (in his case it's a specific system, but Wittgenstein's set of tools allows freely cutting other systems).

That is, the Wittgensteinian philosophies are paradigms for the world built on the idea of the paradigm, which is itself a philosophical idea that stems from Wittgenstein, and like any philosophical idea can be turned into a philosophical tool (all content becomes form - method). They simply make use of it (interesting and deep in the case of thinking and law, parodic in the case of dreaming and soap, and lacking imagination in the Foucauldian case of power, which is really quite a stale concept, or in the popular case of money: "there is nothing outside capitalism").

The philosophy of learning also of course offers a paradigm (to cut learning as the relevant plane from reality) - but it does much more than that, it offers a mechanism beneath paradigms: a learning mechanism. That is, it changes the worldview of philosophy in its view of itself, outside the structure of paradigms: what is philosophy. Indeed, the philosophy of thinking or law could also claim that they change the answer to the question of what philosophy is, as language changed (for example) the answer and created, among other things, analytic philosophy. The philosophy of thinking can claim that it studies philosophical thinking, and every philosophy needs to study thinking, and the philosophy of law can also create a field in which philosophy is perceived (and performed) as a legal system (and as legal thinking, while we're at it). After all, the very ability of philosophy to progress and develop as a human system, despite the fact that in principle it always treads in place, stems from the fact that it has decisions that are by nature legal. Just as the legal system can progress and develop despite the fact that in principle it always treads in place (after all, from within itself it cannot justify why one law and not another), but it still succeeds because it is procedural (for example: based on precedents. Although logically there is no reason to prefer precedent).

But these claims of the philosophies of thinking and law would still be completely equivalent structurally to the claim of the philosophy of language, which preceded them in this structure of claims. That is, they will still remain within the same paradigm. Still within the same worldview of what philosophy is (philosophy is a system! - a relevant plane). They still will not escape the paradigmatic structure. In contrast, what the philosophy of learning does is to escape this structure itself - because learning is not paradigm shifts. And therefore it has the ability to change the structure of the philosophical worldview - and not just its specific contents (language, thinking, soap, learning).

That is, every philosophy changes the non-philosophical worldview - for this is the essence of philosophy. Even the philosophy of soap does this (and also: "everything is water". Which is a completely valid and complete philosophy). But only a philosophy that is a paradigm changes the picture of philosophy itself, how it thinks about itself (or - Wittgenstein would say - talks about itself. Or - learning would say - learns itself). There were countless philosophies in the history of philosophy, but paradigm shifts in the mainstream were five in the history of philosophy: the Pre-Socratics. Plato. Monotheism. Descartes. Wittgenstein.



First, let's see how the philosophy of learning can be a paradigmatic philosophy - and then we'll see how it goes beyond that: how it goes beyond philosophy as a system (because learning is not, ultimately, a system). That is, we'll see how the philosophy of learning is not just cutting a relevant plane, but cutting a new way of cutting relevant planes (and something of this can already be seen so far, in the way it allows cutting law and soap, for example, as philosophies so lightly, and not as some fateful intellectual effort in the Wittgensteinian style - but as a learning move).

Well then: there is a system - and there is the development of the system (and this is the important distinction). Let's say, for example, that we are philosophers of thinking. And we describe a certain state of a thinking system, which has dynamics, rules, motivations, procedures, etc. etc. - everything that creates a rich and interesting system. If so, how did we arrive at this thinking system, and how will this thinking system change in the future - this is the important thing, because the purpose of thinking is change, not a static state. And then we'll notice that there is something much more basic beneath thinking - beneath all thinking - and that is learning. We learned to think in a certain way, and every certain way of thinking has a learning meaning, and this learning is what will determine the change in thinking. That is, there is a first-order system here (thinking, in this case), and a second-order system, which acts on it and shapes it - learning.

If for example we ask how I know something, anything, in a type of thinking called "knowledge", it will turn out that everything is learned. First, we learned this specific thing we "know", as adults. And in addition we learned, for example in childhood, how to think. And in addition humanity learned, throughout history, how to think. And in addition evolution learned, over billions of years, how to think. And in addition learned how to learn. In fact, everything started from learning processes on top of learning processes, on which thinking is like the surface of the ground beneath which is a mountain, and this mountain continues incessantly to change the surface, out of complex tectonic dynamics and surface dynamics (for example: erosion, etc.). That is, all thinking, namely dynamics on the surface of the mountain (a sheep's foot carved a path, for example) - its deep and true meaning is changing the mountain. The mountain is the real thing, and the surface of the mountain is the product. Learning is the mountain - and the surface is thought.

From here we will arrive at a radical and reductive, Wittgensteinian statement, which deals with the boundaries of the system: there is no thinking outside of learning. All thinking is a particular case of learning. And any idea that we have some objective thinking (for example reason), or thinking in itself, outside the dynamics of learning is a harmful and illusory idea. There is no reason why I think in a certain way - and there can't be - except that I learned to think that way. What determines is learning, and in fact the idea of thinking itself is unnecessary and illusory, as if I arrived at some final, orderly, logical and unchanging system - because I didn't and won't arrive (in principle). Because in principle I am trapped within the dynamics of learning. There is nothing outside of learning (as "there is nothing outside of language"). But this is not because learning is another system, competing and external to thinking, like language for example. It is precisely because learning is not a system, but the dynamics of the development of the system, which is the important thing. It is not about a competing plane, but about dynamics beneath planes, which constitutes them. This is perhaps like understanding that there is not really politics, but only history (at most politics is history under a magnifying glass), but there is no political dynamic that is not historical by nature.

Now, in the same way we used the thinking system in the example above, we could have replaced it and used any other system, and looked at the internal learning of the system, including the language system. Because how do we know how to use language? We learned for several years. And how did language itself come into being? Through learning of hundreds of thousands of years at least. And what really happens in the language system all the time - are we engaged in a language game, or are we actually engaged in changing the rules of the game, and this is the main interest in language? For example, to convey new meanings, and to be the politicians of language. In every relationship we build unique language games, that is, learn or teach them, and in every research we invent new terms, new expressions, and here is the main power of language. After all, Wittgenstein's power is precisely in the linguistic innovations he created, such as "language game", and in the books he wrote, that is, in the learning activity of language. This is not related to the grammar of the verb "to learn", as Wittgenstein would answer (and indeed answered), but to the possibilities that the idea of learning opens up for us in understanding the development of the language system, which the idea of the game, for example, with its static essence, completely misses.

So too - and as Jews we certainly understand this better than anyone else - in referring to law as a learning system, just like in the Talmud. What is important is the development of the law, and the development of legal practice, and this is the way in which law responds to reality, that is, grasps it in its own tools. That is, the law itself is grasped in the tools of learning. This is the right way to understand it, and to understand every move in it. It's not the function itself, but the change in function, the derivative. That is, it's not the action itself but the change in action - that's where the application of power is and where the acceleration is. For example, if you are reading this, is language important here, that is, the transfer of meaning, or is learning actually the thing that is really happening here. And language is some external shell of the learning essence of the essay. Just like the screen and its pixels, and the visual system, and all kinds of other systems are here, but they are only shells for what is really happening here, and the black and white pixels are not the correct and relevant plane for describing the situation (although we could have decided that they are the system and everything is expressed in them. Here's this word too turning pixels on and off, right? But is this the right plane for understanding it?). Because the relevant plane for examining any system is the learning plane. There is no law outside of learning the law (Kafka describes what happens when there is an unlearned law). There is no language outside of learning the language. There is no meaning to language without learning and there is no meaning to law without learning, because the meaning is in the dynamics of the development of the system (therefore if there is no learning in dreaming or soap - there is no meaning in them. Although they are completely valid language games).

Any attempt to think about the legal system outside of learning, and without its reach, that is, as a kind of absolute German law ("duty") without any learning discretion, its result is catastrophe. And as we see in the Gemara, even regarding the most absolute divine law, its deepest meaning is precisely in the dynamics of learning, that is, not in the Torah but in the study of Torah. And let's be precise here, because of a common Christian-secular misunderstanding: the true meaning of Talmud Torah [Torah study] is not to learn what the Torah commands, but the learning of the Torah itself - the internal development dynamics of it (learning within the system, and not outside the system). Just as the deep meaning of learning thinking is not in a child who learns a certain thinking, but in the development of this form of thinking itself, in someone who completely masters it and expands it, for example through research or innovative writing (and of course we can replace the word thinking with language here). From all this it follows that there is no legal system outside of learning. A system outside of learning, according to Wittgenstein's obsession with the pure system (everything is only as it appears in language), is missing the most important and interesting thing about systems: their development and the various ways of learning in which it occurs (the methods).

The methods are the true essential characteristics of the different systems, because they cause the essential differences between different types of systems, and the similarity between different systems. Because what determines, ultimately and over time, is not this or that state of a system, but how it develops. Two seeds can be very similar, but different trees will grow from them. And two seeds can be very different - but similar trees will grow from them. Because the form of growth is what determines. And in another metaphor - two children can grow up in the same house, but because each has a different learning genetics, then its ongoing influence will be the critical variable, and they will grow up completely differently: one a scientist and the other a gardener. On the other hand, children with a similar form of growth can come from different environments, but both converge on the form of growth of scientific research, and both will become scientists, according to the scientific method of educating people for science. What is interesting here is the method of developing a scientist. And what is interesting in human beings is precisely the complexity of their methods - this is the true characteristic of the human and the rational: a very rich method (or, and a hint to the wise is sufficient: a method of methods). And even with great people this is what is most interesting (and challenging): the attempt to trace their ways of learning. How were masterpieces created?

Wittgenstein is full of wonder and admiration for the system, and it is the only thing worth answering in his eyes, but how were such systems built that are worth discussing, beautiful and rich? Only through learning. Language is not some wonderful and unnatural miracle that needs to be explained (as it sometimes seems to seem to Wittgenstein), and neither is thinking, because despite their complexity they were created through learning, and in fact any real complexity was created this way (and this is by definition of an interesting system: a system that has something to learn. This is the property of the learning machine that is our brain: we want and are built to learn). A system outside of learning is a dead system (what characterizes life is learning, not this or that function, and in fact life is defined by the learning system that created it: life is what undergoes evolution). In the same way, thinking outside of learning is not intelligent (as in non-learning software), and this is not thinking but computer calculation. Intelligence is characterized by learning. Therefore it is impossible to think outside of learning. And it is impossible to speak in language outside of learning the language. And a legal system cannot operate outside of learning, because otherwise it is a static law and not law (only learning, that is, the change of law, is justice).

It's like there is no meaning to science outside of scientific learning - science is not and will not be a doctrine. And this includes any specific finite scientific theory, even if the theory of everything is found (thus learning instills a "learning philosophy of science"). Science will always be the study of applying the theory of everything to specific cases, or a deeper understanding of it, or thinking about physics in theoretical universes, that is, it will always be characterized by research, otherwise it is no longer science (but doctrine). Even mathematics and logic (which are the true inspiration for the Wittgensteinian purism that is also strongly expressed in his later philosophy) are not static systems, and what really characterizes them is mathematical learning (and this is what mathematicians do! They don't "know" mathematics - they learn it. And all their knowledge is part of this learning). Anyone with eyes in his head sees that learning is behind every real achievement, both in man and in the universe. Learning is probably a law of nature that stems from the very mathematical nature of the universe (its existence stems from P!=NP).

In any case, we - certainly we are learning. Our brain has no perception or knowledge of anything that does not pass through learning. Learning is the most basic structure of our mental or spiritual world (and also physically of the brain). And therefore it is the infrastructure for our perception of the world. It is the true category, in the Kantian sense. And we have no access to the world except through learning. Since we were born our brain has learned, and even today it continues to learn, and so it will do until the day we die, which will be our last day of learning and its end, and in it we will cease to exist precisely because we will stop learning (therefore, if we were to freeze ourselves without learning change, we would cease to be ourselves and become a machine that imitates us). Since everything passes through us through learning, we have no zero point (like with Descartes for example), from which everything begins, but everything is always added and built through what we have already learned. And in fact nothing has meaning in itself, because its meaning is what we learn from it, and different methods will learn different things from it. It is not with meaning that we need to deal - but with methods.

We do not have some objective point of support outside of learning (for example of "reason", "logic" or even "intuition"), that would allow us to examine our learning from the outside, and allow us to criticize it. All criticism is learning to criticize. We criticize as we have learned. And we also learned intuition. There is not really such a thing as logic, and what is called logic is learned. That's why so few people think logically. No one would think of logic on their own without learning it (and indeed there is no person who thought of it alone, but it is a learning product of many generations). Also, no philosophy would have been created without the history of philosophy, that is, if we had not learned philosophy and without the learning development of philosophy. We have no way, for example, to reverse learning. That is, to go back in our learning, to its beginning and to first principles. Because we have already learned, that is, our ways of thinking and its methods have already changed, so there is no way to go back as in the form of a series of logical steps or calculation or proof. We simply have no such calculation, or such thinking, that is outside the learning we have already gone through. We will not be able to erase learning except through counter-learning. Because we really have no other brain function. The brain does not know how to function without learning.

And this is also the meaning of our being members of a certain culture - we are the product of learning of generations, and we have no ability to free ourselves from our early biases and prejudices that are embodied in our current learning. But we also have no need. Only to continue and learn according to it - and it is a learning thing, that is, interesting and challenging. The pretension to get out of the learning bias in the past is equivalent to a biological creature wanting to return to being the amoeba from which life began for the sake of objectivity, because it is difficult for him with the arbitrary path that evolution chose. After all, why are his eyes brown and not blue? Why was he born Jewish and not Christian? Instead of understanding that this is who he is: a Jew with brown eyes. He cannot free himself from Jewish ways of thinking, because even this liberation itself, or the pretension to it, is an old Jewish trick - and part of the Jewish method. He can learn the Christian method, and this is the meaning of the act of conversion - you change when you learn. But you have no natural zero state, say secular, because you also learn to be secular. There is no possibility of existence that you will reach without learning it - and the boundaries of your world are the boundaries of your ability to learn, and these are the boundaries of your thinking.

Therefore, the use of language cannot be creative in an infinite and free way, because all ability to create is learned. Even random creation is created from learning to use dice. And in fact, free will is the freedom to learn - and nothing else. It is the openness of the learning method. That is why people with methods that have more learning possibilities are freer than people of "learned men's commandments". And whoever learns the same thing from everything - he is the idiot. Learning is your ability to become someone else continuously, when only the method is responsible for the continuity of the self, because you change but the method continues - that is, your innermost core is your method.

We could go on and on, but the exercise here (supposedly!) is the Wittgensteinian exercise, to take something and turn it into a system, and show (in a circular, but possible and closed way, like any circular formation) that there is nothing outside the system. So the observer will say: Wittgenstein did it to language (as a good Jew), and you chose learning (as an even better Jew). What is the fundamental difference? This is a paradigm and this is a paradigm. But exactly here is the difference. Not in the current state of philosophy, after we have replaced the philosophy of language with the philosophy of learning, but in its future development possibilities, that is, its learning. The difference is in the method.



Wittgensteinian philosophy instills a very primitive method for philosophy: paradigm shifts. Since the systems are incomparable, because each is like language and consistent in its tools, then one can only talk about paradigms that replace one another, and certainly cannot talk about progress. And here, Wittgenstein will say in his grave, so you just presented a new paradigm - and why would we prefer it over language? And in general, why would we prefer any paradigm over another? (This is the reason that the philosophy of language ended in the decadence of relativity in postmodernism: without learning, which explains the development of the language game and constitutes it, what is the advantage of this language game over another?). After all, what did you do here, if not Wittgenstein of learning?

In fact, any new philosophical paradigm can be interpreted in terms of the previous paradigm (Wittgenstein as a special case of Kant, Descartes as a philosopher of religion and revelation, or the interpretations of monotheism within the Platonic and Aristotelian framework). Because any philosophy that is paradigmatic is the last case of the previous paradigm - and the first of the new one. What is important in philosophy is not how it can be interpreted (because all philosophy can be interpreted as footnotes to Plato) - but what new possibilities it opens (and this is a learning idea par excellence). Therefore, we see the new paradigm precisely in the philosophies that came after the philosophy that opened the paradigm, because they already reside in the new space that has opened, and not at the edge of the old space. That is, paradigmatic philosophy is the meeting between two philosophical spaces - which allows passage between them.

In fact, one could imagine a reverse transition: that is, the history of philosophy is symmetrical in time and could have progressed in the opposite direction - and if we imagined the history of philosophy as progressing from the future to the past it would have been completely logical (first Wittgenstein and then Kant and then Descartes, for example). That is - there is no internal logic of progress here, but a logic of innovation and expansion, that is, a learning logic of learning something new: opening new development possibilities (not transition between philosophies that cannot be compared in the space of possibilities, but addition of spaces of possibilities). From all this we are already tasting the reading of philosophy in the learning paradigm, which is no longer reading it as a sequence of paradigms, but as a learning sequence. Because the philosophy of learning allows (does not force. It cannot force) new possibilities and a new method for philosophy, which does not exist in the philosophy of language, and hence its validity as a continuation of philosophical learning.

Learning allows us to think about the development of philosophy, like any system, not in the form of paradigm shifts, but in the form of learning. Therefore, unlike the philosophy of language, it deals essentially with the history of philosophy. And it is built out of thinking about the history of philosophy, and through identifying philosophical methods and making use of them. In doing so, it creates a new philosophical method itself. No philosopher has explicitly asked what methods exist in the history of philosophy and how to create from them a new philosophy or new philosophies. This is learning thinking.

There are no jumps between paradigms: this is the thinking of someone who has a lacuna in thinking, because it lacks the methods of system development, so he jumps (after a systemic crisis) to another system. But it doesn't work like that at all. There are no jumps in learning. Every system develops gradually continuously (sometimes very quickly in an explosion of ideas and possibilities) to the next system. In fact, learning is always a local change in the system, and therefore it is usually conservative (too much!), and only rarely is there a rapid mutation rate (usually resulting from a new method), or a mutation that creates a huge change, but this mutation is a small and local change (the linguistic logic is that a small local change can create a huge change, not just a small one. For example, the small word "not" reverses the meaning of the sentence). But the system simply cannot jump as if by magic from one state to a completely different state, without a learning method that will allow and create the transition between the two states. My brain cannot suddenly change completely - and suddenly I will become another person.

And so philosophy does not jump from paradigm to paradigm (as from a simplistic logical point of view every new philosophy simply contradicts the previous ones), otherwise it would have become incomprehensible to people of the new paradigm and we would never understand the thought of the past, but it passes through learning change. When we understand philosophy of the past we are actually learning it, for example from Aristotle's writings, and then Aristotle's philosophy is added to our space of thinking possibilities, and maybe even methods are added to us (which is the characteristic of a great philosopher). And this is actually the value of studying philosophy.

Therefore, first of all we explained the philosophy of learning through the idea of philosophical paradigms, that is, we used previous philosophies to explain the new one, and to build it. And only at the end did we throw away Wittgenstein like a ladder after we had already climbed. If we had jumped directly to the philosophy of learning no one would have understood it, because it is a new idea, and if someone had understood it, he would have understood it only in terms of the old idea, and therefore would not have understood the innovation in it - he would not have understood it as a new idea, because it is difficult to build a new conception. That's why gradualness is important in learning. And only after we explained learning as a paradigm, could we explain it as something that goes beyond paradigms. And the very fact that there is a worldview here that goes beyond what was - this is the sense in which philosophy progresses. Because it is easy to create mutations within the old framework (philosophy of soap), but to create a new framework for mutations, which does not collapse or is trivial, but interesting (that is, learning), is difficult - and this is what philosophy does.

That is, we examined (learned!) the philosophical method, and added (learned!) a new method to do philosophy, using the methods of philosophy. Like all philosophy it is circular and that's what's beautiful. And we also saw how easily we apply the new method to create interesting philosophies like the philosophy of thinking, the philosophy of law and the philosophy of learning. And how we use the philosophical methods we identified in Wittgenstein (as opposed to the contents we identified in him) to present the philosophy of learning as a possibility. There is also an antithesis here (by the way, another method!): Wittgenstein's philosophy arrogantly canceled the philosophy before it (Wittgenstein even claimed that he did not read Kant!), while the philosophy of learning is built entirely on the philosophy before it. In fact, it says that this is the way to do philosophy: to find philosophical methods in previous philosophy and apply them to create new philosophies. And in addition - to learn from the philosophy before it how philosophy contributes to all other branches of the humanities and science and to use the idea of learning to make a similar contribution.

It also proposes to classify the different ways of learning and give them signs, thereby helping to identify new ways of learning. For example, "learning from examples" - through masterpieces: moving to a learning reading of masterpieces, which extracts from them learning moves and methods. And "learning through demonstration", for example demonstration of methods or ways of thinking (here in this essay for example), that is, learning the example not as an object but as a sequence of actions. And learning creativity, that is, searching for points of creativity, the points where innovation is created, in all kinds of methods and doctrines, and focusing on them to create new innovations. And on the other hand, improving the teaching of what has already been achieved, so that the teaching of philosophy teaches how to do philosophy and not what was done in philosophy, just as the teaching of science teaches you to be a scientist and not to be a historian of science. On the other hand, a great lack in current scientific teaching methods is that they hide and cover up the historical ways of creating science and thus prevent inspiration and understanding of how it is really done, and instead give a sterile picture of the finished product (in mathematics this problem is exaggerated). Indeed, a philosophy of learning cannot be content with presenting itself, but it must also provide ways to continue learning in the future.



Of course, a central direction in this move will be to better understand the phenomenon of learning itself - how it is performed, and what constitutes it as a way (here we suggested for example: locality and gradualness, that is, continuity in space and time. There are of course other suggestions). Another possibility is taking methods from other fields and using them in philosophy - and vice versa - and starting to transfer methods wholesale between different fields. After all (for example) there are also development methods in economics, and also in the field of computer learning, so maybe there is a method in one of the fields that will benefit the other (or philosophy: the field of meta-methods). And here we also copied the idea of "learning from examples" from computer learning. But there is in computer science theory, for example, a series of definitions of different learnings that can be examined each in the philosophical context. Hence the potential of the idea of learning to create a new system of philosophies and philosophical space. Because unlike the past, where philosophers came to their philosophy through internal theoretical considerations, from a philosophical learning consciousness it is already possible to apply meta-philosophical tools and methods and considerations to arrive at a new philosophical doctrine - and to do so consciously, systematically and explicitly.

But the most important thing of course is to note that a new philosophy needs to be interesting enough - and not just new - that is, with high learning potential. We are looking for new methods and not just more paradigms that are variations on the previous ones - we aspire to the highest. This too must be learned from the history of philosophy - what is not valuable philosophy (and why). The philosophy of our days can serve as an example for this. And so, in precedents and counter-precedents, and in examples that become methods and vice versa (in the duality of function becoming functional), we receive the image of philosophy as Talmud. And go and learn the rest.

But one last question remains, the Jewish opposite question: if everything is so good and necessary - then why didn't it happen before? Why has the learning turn in philosophy, and in general, been delayed until now? Well, what blocked the idea of learning in philosophy is an incorrect picture of it as a handmaid of knowledge and as a special case of it - and worse: the structure of knowledge was copied to the structure of learning (and we see this already in Plato with the ridiculous way in which the learner "remembers" a mathematical proof and does not learn it - this is not just a later failure that resulted from epistemology). In particular, throughout the paradigm period of epistemology, the dominant picture of learning was the insertion of knowledge into the head from outside, as we see in the expression "learn the material".

Only the Wittgensteinian idea of the system - with the emphasis on looking at everything only within the system (language) - allowed to release learning from the picture in which it is a change that comes from outside the system into it, and gave the emphasis on learning as what happens inside the system - in its internal development. For example, the previous dominant picture was of brain learning as vision (or input from the senses), and the new dominant picture is of brain learning as internal changes in neurons. The previous harmful picture of learning also had a temporal component: learning was perceived mainly as learning of the past (or sometimes the present), and not as learning of the future - that is, a creative development process from within. Hence the conservative, anti-innovative image of learning (as Jews, it is clear to us that the purpose of learning is innovations). Even when previous pictures of learning as a change in the pattern of activity of a system did exist, they perceived learning mainly as "bad" education - like indoctrination, conditioning and programming - that is, they perceived it from the side of teaching from outside, and they too reinforced the picture of learning as coming from outside the system.

In contrast, Jewish learning created a special legal system, in which learning is the central value of life. Only the lack of knowledge of Jews like Wittgenstein of the world of the Talmud delayed the intellectual transition (parallel to Christianity) from the core idea of Judaism - learning - to philosophy. Assimilated people like these took more external characteristics of Judaism (the book, existence in language, interpretation) and transferred them to philosophy, but they did not touch its intellectual and conceptual core. Therefore, if we look for the sources of modern learning - systemic and organizational - in ancient intellectual history, we will find them precisely in legal learning: in the study of Torah. Just as Christianity was the transfer of the deep structure of the written Torah to the Gentile world, so the philosophy of learning is the transfer of the deep structure of the oral Torah. Therefore, in tracing the origin of the idea of learning, we ask: is there something in the nature of the oral legal system that forced the creation of the idea of learning?

It turns out that it is something that is in the middle between the strength of religious law, on the one hand, and the flexibility that stems from its oral existence, on the other hand, that created for the first time a distinct, conscious, extensive and long-term learning system (more than two thousand years). That is, there is a system here that is both of tremendous and comprehensive power enveloping all areas of life of an entire group (like "language"), and on the other hand its internal development is its central value. In addition, there is something in the nature of law that creates learning (and it is no coincidence that Wittgensteinian examples of learning are learning a rule). After all, where does the power and content of legal law come from in the first place, if not from learning? Why this law and not another? Learning is by nature the combination of motivation to act and the content of action - learning is not just learning neutral content (learning knowledge), but learning to do something, even intellectual (good education is learning). Therefore learning is essential to law.

And indeed - any attempt we know to separate between the power and validity of law in the world (why "obey" the law) and its specific content in the world (what the law "says") is artificial and failing (the law after all says to obey itself...) - because this is an invalid and anti-learning dichotomy (Kant obeys the law because Germans educated him, and he obeys so much that he finds reasons for obedience). Even divine law did not fall on us from heaven, but was learned from them through methods - and this was the Jewish idea. Although only in Chazal literature did the idea of learning become completely conscious, but it is what created the Bible in the first place: through a religious method. The Bible is probably the first literary creation that was not created by any person - but was created in learning (of a people, that is, a system). Hence its superhuman nature. The ancients simply identified learning with the divine.

And since we are learners, then from the formation of learning precisely from the oral Torah we learn an important lesson for philosophy. Only Jewish religious zealotry for the law on the one hand, and Jewish argumentative flexibility on the other hand, are what created learning in the space between them. Any learning system that becomes aware of itself and the learning that creates it, including philosophy now, is exposed to two contradictory dangers. On the one hand - excess in the strength of the law and fixation on the past and learning from it, and on the other hand - excess in flexibility and abandoned creative learning that leads to disintegration and empty learning playfulness. The two learning failures that lurked for religion throughout history lurk also for philosophy. And only the mechanism of masterpieces and canonization will be able to save philosophy, as it has saved it so far.

If so, let us note the resounding fact that not even one philosophical masterpiece was written in the second half of the twentieth century, and not by chance. Analytic philosophy turned to the fixed way, and continental philosophy turned to the abandoned way. Therefore if we want to nurture philosophy as a developing ecosystem we must reformulate philosophy anew as a learning system - and thereby raise its self-awareness of its own deep mechanisms within it: to philosophical learning.