On Thursday April 30th 2026 Yale University changed its mission statement from language that included "improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community,” to “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”
Shabtai, the global Jewish Leaderhsip Society based at Yale stands as the spiritual and intellectual communal vanguard of freedom of expression, and discourse at the Ivy League. Shabtai improves the world by educating aspiring leaders through its ethical, interdependent, and diverse programing.
In this spirit, Kellner Academy is honored to release a personal talk given by Professor Anthony Kronman, delivered at the Anderson Mansion five days after the unprecedented massacre of Oct 7th 2023.
Professor Kronman serves as a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School and was the 14th Dean of Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004.
Professor Kronman has honorably served as a mentor and friend of the Shabtai community for 30 years.
My Life Speech
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Anthony Kronman: Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Shmully, I cannot tell you how much good it does my heart to be at this table at this moment. I mean, I've been to dinners, Shabtai dinners that you've hosted many times before, and they're always wonderful and warm and filled with the spirit of life and everything that Yale at its best, stands for and exemplifies. But this night is special. The last five days have been, for me, absolutely dreadful. As a Jew, as a staunch forever friend of Israel, and as a friend as I'd like to think of civilization and the values of civilized life. It's just been awful. I suspect that's been true for many of you around the table as well. And the warmth of your companionship this evening, and the table that you have set to make it possible for me is medicine for my heart, truly. So I thank you for that. And I thank all of you just for your presence here tonight. It's for me it's a mitzvah. It means it means the world to me. And it's the solace I really badly needed and was looking forward to all day long. Okay, so I'm going to answer the question that Ryan asked, but I'm going to work my way around to it by slow degrees. Perhaps you'll think too slow. If I go on too long, just, I don't know, throw something at me or turn out the lights. In 2016, I published a book called Confessions of a Born Again Pagan, which is a very large book.
Anthony Kronman: I'd like to say that, it's, it's, it's size and weight is excused by the breadth of subjects I cover and the, and the number of thinkers I review. But honestly, none of that is an excuse for writing a three and a half pounder that comes in at like 1200 pages. When it was published, one of my close friends at the law school, Alan Schwartz, came up to me. He was very excited. He said, Tony, I see you just published a new book. And I said, yeah. And he said, you know, I read the description online. It sounds fascinating. I just bought two copies, ordered two copies. I said, Alan, I said, I'm so flattered. Two copies. I said, but why two? I mean, maybe one for New Haven and one for New York. He said, no, no, no, no one to read and one for parking on steep hills. And afterwards, a number of friends who made a stab at the book said, you know, you really need to you need to do this, but in an abbreviated version and hopefully a more accessible on. You shouldn't start with Aristotle, for God's sake. You know, begin- How about beginning with yourself and your interest and the questions that you explore in the book? So I heard that often enough to be motivated to write a much shorter book called After Disbelief, which covers a lot of the same ground and begins with some autobiographical remarks that I was hoping would be maybe of more interest to my readers than any of the abstract points I made in the pages that followed, but I also felt that I owed it to myself to try to give some accounting as best I could of how it was that I had come to these questions and to my preoccupation with them.
Anthony Kronman: So I started with myself, or rather, I started with my parents, from whom my self comes. I was born, as Ryan mentioned in his introduction in Los Angeles in 1945. And it's true that my father was a screenwriter who had a very successful career as a screenwriter. He wrote many of the scripts that Robert Post's father directed. So we joked at one point that this was a condition for appointment to the deanship at the Yale Law School, that you had to have had some association with Gunsmoke, either written the scripts or directed the shows or something. But before he was a Hollywood screenwriter, he was a rabbi. He was sent at the age of 16 by his parents from New York, where he was born and had grown up to the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and he spent 6 or 7 years there in the rabbinical program, went to the University of Cincinnati at the same time. I don't know whether he told his parents he was doing this, maybe just to hedge his bets, make sure he had a secular degree in his pocket or something.
Anthony Kronman: But he finished the program and then went on for 2 or 3 years to lead a congregation in Washington, D.C. and the only thing he ever told me about it was that he loathed it, and he would never explained why. I said, but dad, it sounds kind of interesting. He says, no, I didn't like it. He said, I walk in the room and everybody would stop talking. I don't think that's your experience, Shmully. But he said, I felt like the rabbinical wet blanket. And, you know, I just and I didn't really like it. And moreover, I never believed in God. So it seemed like a bad a bad fit all, all around. He went back to, went back to New York and hung out with some bohemian misfits for several years and worked for his brother Sam, who had a furniture making business that specialized in church pews. Apparently, they had a booming business, and he made enough to hold body and soul together. Very, very. It was it was a niche. And had an affair with Lillian Hellman, the playwright. And he never- I knew that because my mother told me that she burned all of her letters to him. She claimed in an accident. And I said, as an act of, you know, historical erasure or something, I thought it was just terrible.
Anthony Kronman: But anyway, it wasn't really happy there. And through a series of, of strange and improbable events that I won't recount, found his way to Los Angeles in the mid 30s and started working on a radio program as a writer, and eventually made the transition to television where he had, as I said, a very successful career. And along the way in 1942 and married my mother, who was working as an actress at Warner Brothers at the time starring in B- B is actually maybe dignifies them more than they deserve B minus C plus films co-starring often with Ronald Reagan, who was constantly rescuing her from Mexican bandits and making sure the train didn't run over her and this and that. And they fell in love and married and I was born three years later. My parents came from remarkably different backgrounds. My father had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home on the Lower East Side. My mother, in an evangelical Baptist household, presided over by her religious nutcase of a mother who would drag her around to tent revivals and, in her later years converted to Catholicism and then deconverted and went through every, I shouldn't perhaps put it quite so pejoratively, but she was religiously unstable, enthusiastic, but unstable. My mother grew up as a result of these early experiences with a profound mistrust of religion. She thought it was spooky and full of bad ideas that did harm to people of small prejudices that she was very intelligent, that early on she could see were just bad for the soul and bad for the world.
Anthony Kronman: So she not only grew out of her religious heritage such as it was, but grew to hate it, hate it, and to hate religion itself in all of its organized forms at least. My father, by the time he had left the rabbinate and moved to Los Angeles and started writing screenplays, had left Judaism way behind. And I wouldn't say that he had a hostility to religion, but he was in. He was decidedly indifferent to it, had no feeling for it, and tended, like my mom, to assign it to the realm of ghosts and, and superstition. His view of religion was cooler than my mother's, but because hers was the hot tempered, passionate view. It dominated in the house and my father went along and deferred to my mom and her fundamental principle. So when it came to religion, so far as child rearing was concerned, was my children not only have no real- I will see to it they develop no taste for it. I'm going to act. I'm going to do everything I can actively think to do to discourage a distaste. And she worked at that very deliberately and conscientiously for many years on me, her experimental pupil. A time came when, I don't know, I'm 10/11.
Anthony Kronman: I asked my parents, well, I have friends who are. Maybe it was. It must have been a little bit older who were going to confirmation, or to bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs and where do I fit in? Do I get one of those? Can I be confirmed? Or, you know, you know, maybe a bat mitzvah, I don't know, would that be okay? And my and my mom said, well, that's a reasonable question. I'll tell you what we'll do. I'm going to take you and your younger brother who got drafted into this experiment. Take you each week to a different religious service. And we'll, we'll investigate them all. And at the end you can decide which you prefer and what you'd like to be. And to my, you know, 12 year old self that sounded like a reasonable proposal. So the first Sunday came and she took me to a Catholic high mass and made me wear a wool suit. And it was the most awful experience of my life. I had not a clue what people were mumbling in a language that, you know, I would say it was Greek to me, except it was Latin to me. And I itched like crazy. And the next week, came around and my mom said, well, what will it be this week? And I said, it'll be the beach, I'm going to the beach. And that was the end of the the end of the experiment.
Anthony Kronman: But I came out of this crucible of forced disenchantment pretty interested in religion despite, despite my mother's strenuous efforts and my father's kind of passive part participation. If something is that bad for you. Oh, my God. You know, I mean, it's got to be a little interesting, right? How can it attract so many people and do them some, you know, so much harm? So I started kind of peeking around the corner to see what I could see about religion. I began to think about it and to ask myself in a very inarticulate, unformed way why it, why it is that so many people seem drawn to it so, so, so deeply and so passionately. I also, I can say this now, looking back over all these years, I know that I was quite apart from the appeal of the danger of the thing itself, I was a religiously curious person. That's a, you know, that's a very vague formulation and I'm not sure I can give you a precise account of what I mean by it. I mean very generally someone who is repeatedly and forcefully struck with the amazing fact that they're alive and that their life only lasts for a while, and who wonder about the rest of reality, including all that was before they came on the scene and everything that's to to follow and, and wonder about how the little transient episode they call their own life fits into the larger picture of things.
Anthony Kronman: And who believes maybe or comes to believe that if they don't have it, that that it's that it's important, maybe even desperately important to pursue that question because a lot and maybe even everything depends upon how you sort it, sort it out. I don't not everyone feels this way. Of course, this is a question that occurs to everyone, but the spiritually curious person, as I use the term, is someone for whom this question becomes a preoccupation. It's a question that that they can't get out of their mind. That's with them constantly. So they're sitting sometimes around a dinner table like this. And the thought occurs to them, well, we're having dinner here, but what about eternity? You know, how does how does this relate to that? A person who can't get that out of their mind is a religiously curious person. There are religiously curious people who are not born into are not active practitioners of any faith tradition. And there are plenty of people who are born into such a tradition and who practice it daily, perhaps, but are not religiously curious in again, in the way I'm using this, this phrase. But I am such a person and I can say this now. I would say, I don't know, not with pride, but with resignation to myself, to who I am. I, you know, there's it's just me and you get far enough on in life and you, you're either comfortable saying that or not, and I feel pretty comfortable saying it so that I put that card on the table. Anyway.
Anthony Kronman: So I went off to college, grew up out of this Southern Californian, you know, weirdly religiously charged, but in the negative way environment in which I'd been brought up, went off to college and was passionately drawn from the start to philosophy to the study of philosophy, because that's where I thought these questions that I had were most likely to be answered. Of course, what I discovered soon enough is that it's only where they're most likely to be asked. And, you know, that was that was a no, that was enough. I found the place where people were interested in what I was interested in. So I started studying philosophy. And very quickly, right at the start of my study of philosophy, I encountered the two great minds from whom so much of Western thought derives in by one route or another. Plato, who's been mentioned by my friend to by Harrison to my right and Aristotle by Ryan to the left. So there they are, the two great giant. You said it. And of course, very early I began to read both of them and read enough of each to get a sense of the fundamental difference that distinguishes them in the most basic way, which ramifies in countless directions. But the basic difference is this they both believe in eternity. They both believe in what Aristotle calls the eternal and divine.
Anthony Kronman: They are both theologians. They both believe that what happens in time at this dinner party can ultimately only be understood, made sense of, assigned its proper value if you view it under the aspect, as theologians say, of eternity. But they had strikingly different conceptions of where that eternity is to be found. And, you know, if you know Raphael's great painting of the School of Athens, it's Plato says here, and Aristotle says here, for Plato the eternal and divine is not of this world. This is all just a blurred, fleeting copy of something that never comes into being, never passes away, that cannot not be. But it's not of this world. It's elsewhere. It's beyond. It's otherworldly. Aristotle said, it's right here. This is. There's all the eternity that you could ever wish or hope to find right here in the world. It is the everlasting order of the world itself. It's the shape of the world. It's not something beyond it. And they had a famous quarrel over this. And reading them, I was given my two templates, you might say. These were the two basic options on the menu that I was handed as a freshman, beginning my study of philosophy. And the two different ways, you might say, of satisfying my religious curiosity, my longing to find make connection with the eternal and divine. I was instinctively natively just affectively emotionally drawn to Aristotle.
Anthony Kronman: And you know why? Well, that's like saying, why do you have the temperament you do? Why do you why do you like the things you do? I could give a, you know, a long answer as to why Aristotle's philosophy is the better of the two, but that's all an afterthought. My attraction to Aristotle began with something much more primitive than that. It began, I suspect, with my love of the world. You know, I grew up out of doors on boats, in the water, and I just loved the world. I loved being in the world. And Plato's otherworldliness seemed kind of thin to me. I didn't like a philosophy which depreciated the here and now what, what Socrates in the Republic calls the world of sights and sounds, the theater of spectacles. I didn't like a philosophy that depreciated that as radically as Plato's did. So I kind of went for Aristotle and read more Aristotle and found myself drawn more and more deeply into his orbit. And then I met a philosopher on the faculty at Williams named Dan O'Connor, a devout Catholic wrestling with his Catholicism, who was preoccupied with one question above all, and that was, how should we understand the encounter of Abraham ism in its Western European form? That is to say, the Christian tradition. How should we understand the encounter between the Christian tradition and the pagan philosophy of Aristotle. The Christian religion, this is true of Islam and Judaism too, of course.
Anthony Kronman: At least in the mainstream orthodox versions of each of these three religions separates the world on the one hand, time and God and eternity on the other, in the same way that Plato does. There is a striking affinity which great thinkers in all three of these traditions recognized between their transcendent conception of divinity and the platonic view which led Nietzsche many centuries later, brilliant reader and connoisseur of thinkers, to describe Christianity as Platonism for the people. It's actually a magnificent formula that has a great deal packed into it. But Dan O'Connor's class got me thinking, well, gosh. So there was the ancient world and Plato and Aristotle. And then there was this long, long, long Christian interlude in the West, which lasted for a millennium or, or more. And that was really Platonism on steroids. So where's Aristotle in this? He just seems to have been cast aside or fallen by the wayside. I know, of course, Ryan, that there were attempts strenuous, brilliant, profoundly thoughtful attempts to reintroduce Aristotle's wisdom philosophy into the creationist theologies of each of the three Abrahamic religions. The Muslims tried it first. Maimonides gave it a, you know, a serious run. And of course, Thomas Aquinas and others did too. But I thought those were all failures because the attempted, the Chirac that they were trying to make between Aristotle and the God who calls from beyond.
Anthony Kronman: It just was never, ever going to work because Aristotle's philosophy is predicated on the divinity of the world, of the world itself. And no, you know, believing Jew or Christian or Muslim can accept that. So I felt again, that Aristotle had somehow been kind of thrown under the, in the West, the Christian bus, but I didn't want to let him go. And I kept reading around and looking for a lifeline somewhere that would help me hold on to my Aristotelianism, but under conditions that seem to me more amenable to my own very modern beliefs and commitments, the most important of which was a belief in the dignity, the value, the supreme value even of the individual, The dignity of the individual. This is a concept which is metaphysically foreign to Aristotle's philosophy and to Plato's as well. Individuals don't count because individuality isn't really something real. All that's real is the general shape of things, the individuality of a thing, of a person, of a glass, of a, of a picture on the wall, the individuality of it. It doesn't even exist, really. And if you think it does, that's an illusion. You're not thinking straight. Well, I thought that was wrong. And the Abrahamic religions supported me in that conviction, because each of them teaches the supreme beauty and dignity of the individual. So I wanted to hold on to that, may I call it Abrahamic insight.
Anthony Kronman: It seemed to me profound. And revive or preserve, resuscitate my Aristotelian conviction that the world itself is God, and God is not some being apart from the world separate from it, who brings the world into being, but just the world itself under a certain description. And then I found the thinker who did it all for me. And this is the answer to your question, Ryan. It was Spinoza who you could describe as a latter day Aristotelian slash lapsed Jew slash, probably a lot of other other things who restored divinity to the world after this long Christian interlude during which God had been exiled from the world, Spinoza brought God back home, reinstalled God in his earthly, earthly throne, and at the same time built a metaphysical system which assigned absolute, absolute value to the individual. In Spinoza's radical vision of things, not just the human individual, but every individual thing. And there I had it. And the spiritual, the religious curiosity, which I had felt really from my earliest days as far back as I can look in my life. That itch was satisfied. You know, I mean, not I, it's not that I've never had to scratch again, but I felt that I was coming on to a, a path of understanding which intellectually and spiritually did for me the things that I felt it most urgent to do or to be done. And that was a tremendous release, a liberation.
Anthony Kronman: It was a it was an enlightenment moment for me. Spinoza teaches, among other things, that, you know, our efforts, our struggle to become more perfect human beings. That's never done because the goal is the goal is beyond our finite grasp. Aristotle didn't believe that. He thought that if you worked at it, studied long enough, had the good luck to have the right teacher. You could become as perfect as a human being can be, which isn't as perfect as a star on Aristotle's view, but it's as perfect as a human being can be. Spinoza thought otherwise. He thought you can work at becoming more perfect, and you can make progress and and reach a higher station. But that's just a way station to a higher station. It's a resting plateau for further efforts at greater self perfection and joy, Spinoza says, exists in the movement from a lower level of power. That's his word to describe your capacity to understand and to to do things with your understanding. Joy exists in the movement from a lower order of power to a higher order. And of course, the minute you're at the higher order, the joy is over. It exists only in transit. And then the challenge is to try to kick it up a notch, as Emeril says, and do it all over again. But there's no end to that. So the work is never done. So my spinozism doesn't leave me content and sitting on my rear end thinking, well, now I've hit the human bliss point and I'm as perfect as a human being can be.
Anthony Kronman: That's complete and total nonsense. For me personally and for any follower of Spinoza. So that's kind of been the arc of a voyage. And it brings me around to a question that will lead me in a couple of minutes to what I said at the very beginning of my talk. Spinoza was a very bad Jew. He was the poster child for Bad Jew, at least in the eyes of some. For others, he was a Jewish hero, not just a hero of thought, but a Jewish hero. Why a bad Jew? Well, you know, he. I'm sure you all know he was formally excommunicated by his congregation in Amsterdam in 1650 something, I think it was, because it was reported he was going around teaching his teenage friends that after you die, there's no life after you die. And the world is God. And they ran and tattled on Spinoza to the rabbi. And the rabbi called him in, and they had a chat. And Spinoza says, well, that's honestly kind of what I believe. And he said, you're out. And, and they, they expelled him. And there's a, you can read it today. The formal, what is it called? The Harem, the declaration of apostasy or something.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: In the in the glass case in Amsterdam.
Anthony Kronman: In Amsterdam. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So this was actually this was a big event and it was a formal proceeding. And Spinoza basically said whatever. And he went his way. And he spent the rest of his relatively short life in the company of his Christian friends who were happy to take him in. Most of them, nearly all of them not practicing Christians, but Christian by birth and by affiliation. They welcomed. They welcomed Baruch, who changed his name to Benedict, to signal the shift of allegiances. But the Jews thought that he was just this was he- He turned his back on the Jewish people. He was no friend to the Jewish people. And that's true in an important respect. In his book called the Theological Political Treatise, it's not Moses, but Jesus that Spinoza holds up as the, as the emblem of spiritual rationality. Interestingly, Hobbes does just the reverse. But that's another story. But you read that book and you look at Spinoza's life and you say, traitor, turncoat, you know, not a friend to the Jewish people. So I am a friend to the Jewish people. I'm a Spinozist, which is about as thoroughly rationalistic as you can get. And I am a friend of the to the Jewish people because I am a Jew. And I say that with self-understanding and with conviction and pride. Spinoza would never have said that, I don't believe. After he had left his congregation. And that has left me with a question to wrestle with. I've thought about this a lot over the years, and I don't know that I have a good answer to it, which is, okay, so you're a spinozist that kind of closes your spiritual arc.
Anthony Kronman: How can you how can you count yourself a Jew, too? I mean, Jews are have very particular local allegiances. They're not the rationalist cosmopolitans that spinozists aspire to be. And the I can't. I don't know that I can say much that is clarifying about that. Other than that, I feel at home with my people and I feel that the things I value are valued by my people and have been valued by them over a very, very long time. So what is Jewish life for me? Is it going to temple? Is it praying? Is it observing the dietary rules? Well, it can't be any of those things because I do none of them. It's this. And this. I'm using the term very loosely. Now, you'll forgive me. This has been going on for a very, very long time, and it's rare, it's valuable, and I am responsible for doing what I can to keep it alive and to pass it on. I mean, first of all. How could I possibly take it upon myself to cut the chain and say, well, that's enough of that, and now we're going to try something new. But beyond that, it's valuable. It's so important to me. And if it's so important to me and so important to the people with whom I identify so closely, how can I not feel an allegiance to them? It's an allegiance to myself in a very deep way. And I have never felt that more strongly than I have the last five days.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And then an apology, as I mentioned to Professor Kronman, that I have an engagement party for a nephew in New York tonight, which I'm about two hours late for, and I'm going to depart, but I want to depart on a high note if I can. Just responding to your brilliant, as always talk, Professor Kronman, about 8 or 9 years ago led a discussion in a big auditorium at Yale with perhaps one of the greatest Jewish rabbis, philosophers, ethicists, historians by the name of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. And it was an auditorium packed with a few hundred students on the Seven Questions of the universe. One of the, one of the great historical days in the history of Yale, frankly, Charlie Hill of blessed memory emailed me the next morning and said, Shmully, a Zen moment at Yale. It was fantastic. Brilliant. We recorded it, thank God. And we have photographs. Subsequent to that dinner, to that lecture, we sat down for dinner in another location of Shabtai, which was then in transition in an apartment on Chapel Street. And the table was a little bit smaller than this number of faculty and a number of students. There's a photograph on the wall, which I pointed out to Professor Kronman before of Professor Steven Smith with Rabbi Steinsaltz on the wall in the hallway. Matise Bitton, who graduated last year, now at Harvard, once asked me who, who is in the photograph with Professor Smith which, which was interesting. And I said, that's Rav Adin Steinsaltz.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I never heard of him. I said, well, you should. He's one of the great Jewish writers, authors, philosophers and rabbis of the 20th century, a real genius. He came back a few days later and said to me, you know, I asked Professor Smith what, what happened? The photographs are pretty compelling photograph. What happened? And Steven Smith had just finished his book, Modernity and Its Discontents, and he says, well, I couldn't have written the book without having met him. But there's something else that happened that night in light of your talk, which I want to mention. Steven Smith wrote a book called Liberalism, Spinoza and the Question of Jewish Identity or Liberalism, Spinoza and Jewish identity. I always question if the word question is in the title. I got to go back and check. I read the book 25 years, 20 years ago. So Professor Kronman. Steven Smith was taking shots. Rabbi Steinsaltz was smoking his pipe and taking shots. They were in the apartment that night after your talk and Steven Smith had written this book about Spinoza and turned to this great sage. There was a sage living in the 20th century. Rav Steinsaltz would have been one of those great sages. And he said to Rav Steinsaltz, after probably his fifth or sixth whisky, which is generally when even the great philosophers start speaking truths. And he said, maybe I shouldn't be teaching Spinoza after all. And Steinsaltz, the great genius, turned to him and said, maybe you can redeem Spinoza.
Anthony Kronman: Maybe you can?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Redeem. And that's the photograph. So. I think we're going to open it up to Q&A at this point.
My Life Q&A
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Harrison Muth: I guess my question is, when you were talking about your philosophical and spiritual journey, you talked about like personal dispositions and kind of the shape of your mind and searching for some sort of fit between that and the thinkers that you were reading. And I was wondering how you thought about this idea of like correspondence and fit and your own personal dispositions with truth, with a capital T, how do you see that relationship?
Anthony Kronman: Oh, my. You know, to answer the question in a philosophically perspicuous way, I would have to be able to step outside of myself and, and my own dispositions, which are to a degree opaque to me as I think they are to us all. I have- I've tried to think some things out, and until I have, I'm not happy with my views, but I know that my views, the soil in which my views grow, lies beyond or beneath my own powers of rational inspection or reconstruction. I think I can, I, you know, I can make some progress understanding myself and why I feel drawn to one thing or appalled by another or disinterested in it. But, but it's but it's limited. And I know that that I have certain elementary moods that incline me in one direction or another in the same way, you know, some people are optimists and others are pessimists. And I don't think optimism or pessimism is something you can either be argued into or argued out of. Ultimately, it kind of sets the stage for your for the life, for the life of reflection. It's a gravitational field within which thinking proceeds. And I'm no different than anybody else. And so when I say I was temperamentally drawn to Aristotle, I'm sorry, temperamentally drawn to Aristotle. It's because so many of the things- I mean reading Plato is thrilling, but so many of the things that he philosophically gave the back of his hand to, I loved. I loved the theater of sights and sounds, the spectacle. I love that. And I wanted if I was going to find God, he had to be right in the theater and not elsewhere. But why? Why? I don't know. Reason goes only so far.
Guest: This is wonderful. Assuming there are no children's books versions of Spinoza, or lessons of a born again pagan. How did you and your wife think about passing these views of the world and these truths down to your children?
Anthony Kronman: Well, Nancy, my wife, is a completely. Well, let me put it this way. She has no religious curiosity. She and I are apples and oranges when it comes to that. She's also not an observant Jew. Never has been. She never had a bat mitzvah. She quit Sunday school because she told her parents that it made her legs hurt and they believed her, and that got her out of it. But she is she has a fierce Jewish identity. And for her, that is, importantly, not exclusively, but importantly, a question of family loyalty and family identity. So when we married and had children, it really went without saying. We never discussed it, that our children would receive a rudimentary Jewish education and be bar bat mitzvah and be brought up to know that they are Jews. And we enforce that in, you know, lots of lots of small ways and- And they all think of themselves, you know, decidedly as Jewish. And they are, you know, intermittently Jewish in their practices. You know, they go to temple. Some of them, on some holidays. But that's pretty much it.
Anthony Kronman: But the identity is very strong. And Nancy and I felt wasn't even a question, wasn't something we set out to do deliberately. It just went without saying that we would make sure that it was passed along. And, and I would say that that, let me start a little differently. I spend a lot of time with all of my kids. Our dinner, our dinner table is like this at home. It was from the time they were little. And we set the table and lit the candles every night for dinner from the time they were infants. And there was always a conversation, single conversation around the table. And when they were able to participate, they did. And that was it. And they kind of grew up experiencing that as life. That's what life is, what family life. But the life of the spirit, of the mind and the spirit is. And so I think to the extent for me that is welded to my notion of Jewishness, it is for them too. I don't know if that's a complete answer, but it's at least a part of an answer.
Guest: Thank you professor. So my question is kind of twofold. You mentioned sort of like going deeper and deeper into Aristotle, especially after you found out that he was sort of like Christianized, but he didn't want to give up that sort of like Aristotelianism. I guess I'm wondering what were your, what was your reaction? I'm assuming you probably encountered this in Aristotle. What was your reaction when you read about his account of the unmoved mover or the prime mover?
Anthony Kronman: When I read?
Guest: The Unmoved Mover, the prime mover, right, which, you know, many a Christian who say, oh, sure, that's God he was talking about. And then, the second part of that question is you spoke about Spinoza. Spinoza has this whole philosophy of Natura Naturans, right? God, sort of like in nature. But then if you turn to people who were sort of contemporaries of Spinoza or, I don't know, it was before him. Thomas Hobbes has this whole account of the state of nature. And the state of nature, we are essentially beasts, right? We are brutes who are in a war of all against all. But then you mentioned, you know, you believe in the dignity or the worth of the individual. So how do you reconcile this account that if God is nature, if God is personified..., God is nature, then what accounts for the brutality we inflict on each other?
Anthony Kronman: Sure. Well, those are three questions, really. The prime mover, Natura Naturata, Natura Naturans and then man the beast. Yes. The, you know, the passages in which in the physics and elsewhere where Aristotle describes or discusses the prime mover. It's, it's tempting to read those in a, you might say, a proto creationist way. He's talking about a god outside of the natural realm who sets it in motion. Maybe not through a creative act, but just by being such an outstanding example of fulfilled being that everything in nature strives to imitate or exemplify, exemplify it in whatever way it can. But I don't, I think we are blinded by our Christian habits, Abrahamic habits, really, when it comes to reading that passage. And the better way, which is to say the way that's more consistent with the fundamental premises of Aristotle's metaphysics, is that what he means by the prime mover is the eternality of the internal actuating principle that runs the world, the axis of fulfilled being around which all the motions in the world revolve. But isn't something outside of the world external to it but the indwelling principle of realization that is the world's own indwelling engine or something like that. Natura Naturata, Natura Naturans. These, for Spinoza, are different ways of describing one thing, which is the world. The world can be viewed under two different aspects you might say. These are two descriptive perspectives from which we can view the world. But the world is one. And we shouldn't think that actually there are two things a world and then some something else which is moving it, that sets it in motion and that and that these two terms are meant to imply a division between them. That would be completely incompatible with Spinoza's fundamental monism, which rules out any division of that kind.
Anthony Kronman: And as to bestiality, you know, I mean, Spinoza, like Hobbes, recognized that that most people are, to begin with, most of the time are pretty bestial and that it takes a lot of work on the part of their teachers and others to, to work them up into some respectable human shape. I think that's true. I'm not a. I keep pointing to Harrison over here because he's not only a student of Plato, but of Rousseau too, about whom I have very mixed feelings. I think people, you know, it's. Yeah, we have a. There are prospects of good that can be developed and, and elaborated. But the raw material isn't, you know, it isn't altogether happy. And Spinoza believed that. He said, you know, in a state of nature, human beings behave in the way everything else in the state of nature does. And what is the fundamental law of the state of nature, the state that exists before human beings form civil, civilized societies in which to live and interact. The fundamental law of the state of nature is the big fish eat the little fish. That's Spinoza's phrase. Big fish eat the little fish. And that certainly was Hobbes's view too. So I think there's actually you don't have to be an optimist about human beings in the rousseauian sense to be a spinozist, in my sense, I think. But we're getting pretty deep into the weeds here, Jonathan.
Ryan Gapski: Can we pass the.
Anthony Kronman: Oh. I'm sorry.
Ryan Gapski: It's a bit of a.
Anthony Kronman: I shouldn't be calling. This is your job.
Speaker 7: Thanks Professor for coming and sharing your thoughts. I think you misspoke once, though. You said you and your wife aren't very observant Jews, but I can't think of an act more Jewish than using kvetching to get out of going to synagogue or Sunday school.
Anthony Kronman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's true. My leg hurts. Well, and to which her father said, well, show me how was it before it didn't work. She said, oh. And then she just walked across the room and lost that battle, but learned.
Speaker 7: The joke aside, there seems to be a bit of a tension in your intellectual journey in that if I heard you correctly, part of your, your discontent with kind of versatility or platonic thought is the not complete, but, but some, some measure of lack of role for an individual and individualism and kind of the divine individual or something to that effect. But at the very end, you ended on a note of almost ... humility when it came towards perpetuating the Jewish faith and how you pass it on to others. And that seems to be almost communitarian in a way that, you know, a truly, you know, political in or of the polis would have seen an individual as part of a greater body.
Anthony Kronman: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Is that, you know, is there a tension there? I think there are ways to explain how that's different, but it seems kind of interesting that you've kind of ended up with the thing that you were initially dissatisfied with.
Anthony Kronman: I think there is, you know, I've, I've thought about that. My wife has reminded me of it. She does so regularly. And I don't know that I have a way of reconciling these in any fashion that wouldn't just be kind of glib and not very satisfying. But I'm you know, I'm a pretty when it comes to spiritual matters, a pretty solitary person. I'd like to think things out for myself. In that sense, I follow Spinoza's way, which was the way of the solitary walker thinker. You know, he kept to himself. He had friends, but he pretty much kept to himself when it came to matters of the mind and maybe of the heart too. He had a, he had a need at least a modest need for the, for the presence of other people in his life. He didn't live in a cave. He socialized. I certainly have that. I feel that very strongly. But I feel an allegiance and a loyalty to the traditions of Jewish life that I think Spinoza would have found puzzling, because incompatible with the self-sufficiency of the fully rational individual. And I'm not prepared to say it's just a confession of my own inadequacies as a thinker that I have to fall back on something as weak as a tradition and a community and so on and so forth. It's really of the essence for me. So There it is. You are acute to note the tension, and all I can say is it's me. And I suspect, it's not an unfamiliar predicament. Predicament, if that's the right word. I don't think that it is. Situation in which to find oneself and that many of you probably feel some version of it too.
Ryan Gapski: It's already down there. Yeah.
Josh Hochman: Thanks, professor. I'm Josh and I had a question along some similar lines.
Anthony Kronman: Turn on your microphone so I can. It'd be easier for me to hear. Is it?
Ryan Gapski: Oh, it's just for the recording project.
Josh Hochman: Yeah. Sure. Sure. Just another question about the role of the individual. And, you mentioned that you don't think a fair reading of Aristotle or Plato could point to kind of a focus on the, the individual. And that was something that you found wanting and then you found it in Spinoza. And, and you also mentioned that you from a very young age found the eternal or the divine in the world and in nature. And I was curious how you would ground your belief in the dignity of every individual human being, one that I, I obviously share that belief, but I'm curious whether that is something that you think just comes from instinct or intuition, like you mentioned, some of your beliefs do, or is that something that comes from other priors that you, that you have? And relatedly, does your belief that the eternal or the divine sits or could be fairly said to sit within the world itself. Does that, you know, given your, your, like, love of nature that you talked about, is that you saying that you find the eternal or the divine in nature itself on its own? Is humanity part of that or is humanity set apart from it? And if it's part of nature, then maybe that's where your belief in the dignity of every human being comes from. Because we're all we have a spark of the divine in ourselves.
Anthony Kronman: Yeah. Well, let me start at the back end. That's perhaps the easier part of the question to answer. Spinoza famously said the human being is not a kingdom apart. And a separate enclave within the world. It's a we are, we are part of the world. We are as natural as everything else in the world and not privileged in any special way. That's a very, an attractive view in some ways and a challenging view in others. Because we think of ourselves, we like to think of ourselves as possessing powers and having responsibilities, which do set us apart from other living things and indeed from everything else in the world. All of human ethical life and political life is based on the assumption that we are, in some sense or other, a kingdom apart. Spinoza starts with a metaphysical argument for the reality of the individuality of every of every single thing. An argument, to put it a little differently, an argument for the proposition that what makes one thing different from another? Is something real and not illusory, as both Plato and Aristotle believed. And if the dignity of a thing of anything before we get to human beings is a, is a function of its reality, if it's entitled to our attention and respect because it's real.
Anthony Kronman: And if the individuality of each individual is something real, then its deserves our attention and respect. I mean, one poetic way of expressing this thought is Walt Whitman's. He says, you know, every there is nothing in the world, nothing, however insignificant it seems, that isn't worth a lifetime of observation and pondering. No matter how trivial it seems to be, there is more to it than you could fathom in not just a lifetime, but any number of lifetimes. And that makes it literally respectable. Something that is worthy of being respected. And that's true of human beings, too. Of course, we respect human beings in a general and rather abstract way when we say every human being. We believe every human being to be endowed with certain basic powers. And we honor their right to express, employ or express those powers as they wish. That's a very thin kind of respect, though. It's respecting everybody around this table because he or she is endowed with the elementary power to chart a course in life of their own choosing and that kind of kind of thing. When we talk about, you know, civil rights and the right to vote and the right to be treated as a person entitled to equal respect, these are the things that we generally have in mind.
Anthony Kronman: But there's another sense of respect, which is, I think, more interesting and deeper and more satisfying and closer to Spinoza's and Whitman's, which is that each one of us is, this is Whitman's formulation in a spinozistic spirit, each one of us is an absolutely singular perspective on the divinity of the world. Each one of us, if you think of the world, this is very crude as a diamond with an infinite number of facets. Each of us is a facet, and without that facet which is singular, the diamond would be incomplete and imperfect. And so the work that we have to do, each one of us, is to perfect that the singularity of that perspective, which we are. And this is loosely connected to notions of authenticity and self-expression and self development. But that's where it's in the metaphysical, his metaphysical argument for the reality of the individuality of individuals that Spinoza gets is the purchase that he needs in order to work his way around to this. I've been very abstract about that, and I apologize.
Anthony Kronman: But, you know, Aristotle's view is that to become a perfect human being, as perfect as a human being can be means to work to conform your life to a certain type. There is a type. And the closer you come, the more perfect you are, and you can achieve it fully. And it's no different from one person than another. So this fully realized human being is fully realized in just the same way, and for the same reasons as that one. They're indistinguishable. This refined gentleman is no different from that refined gentleman. And what's peculiar about them? Their sense of humor, their moods, you know, their particular passions. Those don't figure at all in their human being. And therefore, in what we mean by the perfection of their human being is to say, to put it crudely, a stereotypical conception of perfection, whereas Spinoza's and Whitman's and many other thinkers is idiosyncratic. And that's not just a I mean, I've been putting this in. I apologize for in very abstract metaphysical terms, it's a, it's also a, it's an ethical difference. It's an aesthetic difference. All of modern art rests on the assumption that the individuality of individuals is the thing we're striving to grasp or portray.
Gabriel Diamond: Thank you, Professor Kronman, for speaking with us. My name is Gabriel and I have a less philosophical question. Picking up on two things you said. The first is how difficult the past five days have been for you, and it resonates with me deeply. Yeah. And the second is how much you love the world. And this, this love for what what is here in the moment. And I also find myself with a great deal of love for the world. And I'm wondering how you reconcile this in a time that is so difficult. How do you find love for the world? And how do you, you know, when things are painful, I think it's very easy to resort, to hate, resort to very bad feelings. How do you find love in that? Or is it that we should, you know, have a time for peace, a time for war, a time for hate and a time for love. What did you say to that?
Anthony Kronman: Right. Well, it's a very difficult question. I suspect the answer. I, you know, I don't know that there's a single answer to that question. It probably varies from person to person. For me, it helps. In fact, I would say it's essential to have friends and talking with my friends and sharing my feelings and my anguish and, and listening to them is not a cure for the unhappiness, but it's a, it's, it's good medicine. It's some significant solace. And, you know, you can love the world, Gabriel, as you and I do and recognize that it's not a cakewalk. You know, that it's filled with all sorts of the world is a theater of disappointments. But if you lost your love of the world because of that, even when the disappointments are grave, I would say the love was not very solid to begin with. So it has to be. It has to be, it has to be. It has to be durable. And, and it's, you know, and I don't know. I think it's just in addition to friendship, it's important to, to the extent you can to try to take a long view of things and remember that neither the good nor the bad lasts forever. And, and, and doesn't really last for very long. And that better days will come. But that they won't come on their own. They will come with struggle and with bloodshed. And that is the awful fact that I think we are all facing right now. That better days will come for Israel. I feel sure of that. But I don't yet quite see how or when or at what cost. So, you know, my confidence is tempered by opacity when I look at at when I, you know, open my CNN, you know, feed. I don't have a clue what's going to happen next. But it will be better. Yeah, that sounds pretty pollyannaish. I wish I could say something more confident and reassuring, but I can't. It would be false.
Andrew: Thank you, Professor. I'm Andrew. I found your words very moving. At the start of your talk, you talked about religious curiosity, sort of as this fascination with something beyond ourselves, a fascination with the eternity beyond the here and now. And a lot of the rest of your talk was really describing your journey, pursuing this fascination. I'm wondering, how satisfied are you with the answers or answers you've found, and how satisfied do you think anyone can be with the answers they find through philosophy, religion or whatever else.
Anthony Kronman: Not completely and not altogether. You know, if I said I've, I've, I've reached the end. I know now all that I could wish to know. I understand these matters to my complete and final satisfaction. That itself would be completely incompatible with the Spinozist proposition that we're always on the way. So, you know, I feel like I'm making progress, that I've clarified some things. I see more clearly what it was about Aristotle, for example, that attracted me and what the deficiencies are and how they might be repaired. But tons of questions remain. And every, every, every little further beachhead of intellectual confidence that I established for myself just opens a whole new continent of problems. They grow in the dark, the problems, you know. They multiply overnight. I don't know how it can be, but every little bit of confidence becomes a thousand new insecurities. But that is fine. I'm happy with that because I feel like I'm thinking and moving and loving in the right direction. And it feels fulfilling even if I'm not fulfilled and I don't know what the, what would the what would the alternative to that be? I would just make just one. Your opening comment made me think that it's important to probably emphasize one thing. There are many, many, many people who are selflessly devoted to other people, to their countries, to worldly institutions much larger than themselves. They think of themselves as little, you know, subordinate or even insignificant nothings by comparison with the cause they serve. Someone might feel that way about Yale, for example. I know people who do. They give their life for Yale and, and, and serve it selflessly.
Anthony Kronman: But they, they don't think a lot about eternity and the relationship of time to the everlasting. They are worldly men and women. I'm reminded of Machiavelli's remark. Who mentioned? Ben mentioned Machiavelli. In his- History of Florence. Is it Machiavelli or Guicciardini, who was a contemporary of Machiavelli's and a great historian of Florence? I'm sure it was Machiavelli, he said, God help me. But I love my city more than my own soul. That is the worldly spirit right there. I don't know. Don't talk to me about eternity. My city needs me. And, of course, from the vantage point of the religiously curious person, that looks like an absurd little preoccupation. Really? You know, you're moving deck chairs around on the Titanic? Not even that. This is the most absurd thing in the world. How could you? Don't you? Can't you hear the thunder of God? How can you possibly be interested or preoccupied with something as trivial as that? And of course, from the perspective of the worldly person, the passions and obsessions of the other worldly person look equally ridiculous and dangerous. And there's nothing that's more corrosive of political life and its demands than the spirit of religion. Because the minute you invoke eternity, everything that human beings are struggling to do in some practice, it just looks so ridiculously small, it gets swept off the table. So these two, the worldly and the otherworldly, have to be kept apart for the sake of both. And that's one reason I think it's ultimately the main reason why we separate church and state. It's the meaning of the religion clauses in the Constitution of the United States.
Ryan Gapski: Well, on that note, it's 9:30 and we've reached our soft close, but there there is dessert, fruit and maybe babka. I'm not sure, but at least fruit and wine. And if Professor Kronman is willing to stay.
Anthony Kronman: I'll stay for a bit. You know, soft, soft, close is a phrase I haven't heard before, but I think I understand what it means. And I'm now going to live a soft close so I can. I can stay around for a bit.
Ryan Gapski: Yeah. If you want to come up.
Anthony Kronman: Okay.
Ryan Gapski: Please do. But thank you all very much. And most of all, thank you Professor Kronman.
Anthony Kronman: Thank you. Thank you.