Maharal's Cosmology and the Is-Ought Problem

David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, famously introduced philosophy to the is-ought problem - the fact that the universe is a certain way can never imply that a person ought to do something. Even a seemingly morally compelling "is" claim like "dolphins are sentient beings" doesn't entail that people shouldn't eat dolphins; you need to start with a moral axiom like "it is wrong to eat sentient beings." Or, perhaps more in line with Hume's example "God exists and says you shouldn't eat dolphins" doesn't imply that you shouldn't eat dolphins unless you accept "it is wrong to disobey God" as a moral axiom.

Hume's position puts moral philosophy in a quandary because if you can't derive moral axioms from fact claims about the world, where exactly can you derive moral axioms from? The simple answer is that "ought" only has meaning in terms of some sort of goal. So if your goal is to get to the supermarket around the corner, it's legitimate can say "I ought to put my pants on." But there are no cosmic goals that can be derived from facts about the universe, and thus no cosmic morality.

Enter the Maharal. The Maharal draws on two rabbinic statements. The first statement is "God looked into the Torah and created the world". The second statement is "All of the work of the creation of the world was suspended until the sixth of the month of Sivan (the date of the holiday of Shavuot, which celebrates the receiving of the Torah); if Israel would accept the Torah, good; if not, the universe would return to formlessness and emptiness."

For the Maharal, the Torah is not simply a book of law for human conduct. It has another hidden facet - it is a blueprint for the physical organization of the universe. The Torah is thus both prescriptive - in terms of telling man how to behave - and descriptive - in terms of describing the universe. Both aspects of the Torah describe teleological necessities - how the universe ought to be and how man ought to act. The former was carried out in a deterministic fashion when God created the world, the latter is subject to the free will of man to observe or not observe, but when he chooses not to observe the Torah, he violates the divine teleology of the Torah. (This is related to the idea of teleology in classical Greek philosophy, where an object's teleological "purpose" is necessary in order for it to move. This is in contrast to the modern view, where objects in motion stay in motion and they change their motion when acted upon by a force.)

Fig. 1. The universe. Some of it, anyway.

The is-ought problem is thus turned on its head: we do not derive "ought" from "is", rather the "is" derives from "ought". The universe exists because God commanded it via the Torah, and morality is compulsory for the same reason. The Torah rejects the idea that morality derives from truth claims about the world; rather the trueness of the world derives from the Torah, which is a fundamentally moral document.

 Maharal continues this idea, citing another rabbinic passage. "Why was the world created with ten utterances? To teach that the righteous are rewarded for upholding the world that was created with 10 utterances, while the wicked are punished for destroying the world that was created with 10 utterances." (Avot ch. 5)

A naive understanding of this passage would be something to the effect of "God wanted to reward the righteous a lot and punish the wicked a lot, so he spent more effort on creating the universe, which makes sins and good deeds more significant." To the Maharal, this reading of the passage in incorrect and misses a fundamental concept.

The number 10, in the Maharal's view, has a symbolic meaning. In our base-10 number system, the digits represented by the numbers 1-9 are unique and individuated - they are each assigned a separate symbol. Once we arrive at the number 10, the unique, individual numbers are "collected", so to speak, and converted into a 1, moved over by a decimal place. (The Maharal is actually thinking here in terms of the Hebrew Gematria number system, but the same reasoning applies there as well.) 10 thus symbolizes the individuated coming together in an organized collective. The "world created with 10 utterances" therefore means "the world that was organized and collected from disparate units into a single unit."

In the Netivot Olam's cosmology, God initially created the world "like a hammer splitting a stone" (Jeremiah 23). In other words, creation involved an explosive event sending matter hurling everywhere (big bang theory much?).  A force was thus needed to ensure that the matter would unite and become larger, organized objects. In the modern understanding of physics, this role is played are the four fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak fundamental forces. To the Maharal, the Torah is the force binds matter together, because of the Torah's teleological directive for matter to organize. (A modern Maharal might hold to his view and claim that the four fundamental forces are all manifestations of the Torah's influence on matter.)

The consequence of the above interpretation of reality is that the consequences of moral violations - violations of the Torah - are not limited to man and his immediate surroundings. Rather, violations of the Torah disrupt the very fabric of the universe, because the Torah is the only thing preventing the universe from dissipating into entropy. The wicked destroy the "world that was created with 10 utterances" - that is, the universe which is made of disparate particles that are united by the cosmic force of the Torah - while the righteous uphold it.