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Zohar Atkins Profile picture
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2 Nov, 7 tweets, 1 min read
Hope you enjoy my podcast debut on Ari Lamm's excellent The Good Faith Effort. I had so much fun talking to this beautiful soul and insightful interviewer.
Some questions I really enjoyed, and still enjoy pondering

Why are most modern songs love songs? 1/5
How do we bring poetry and art back into the straight-laced world of analytic learning, be it yeshiva or academia?

2/5
Wasn't Leo Strauss wrong about Maimonides; he was really a religious Jew first and a philosopher second?

3/5
What does the Biblical mode get that the Western rational (Greek one) doesn't?

4/5
So many ways to answer these wonderful questions. I always come back to Heidegger's dictum, "questioning is the piety of thought."

Great questions should remain questions.

5/5
here's the link open.spotify.com/episode/4OYqXk…

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More from @ZoharAtkins

Zohar Atkins Profile picture
29 Oct
I wrote about two models of covenant, the conflict between obligation and choice, the parallels between Abraham and Rebecca, and the Torah's (complex) relationship to family life.

With thoughts on @PatrickDeneen and Pierre Manent along the way.

etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/a-lily-among…
The pairing of Abraham and Rebecca recurs thorughout Jewish history. The first set of tablets are given to us by God, while the second set are composed by Moses.
The covenant is said to have begun when God lifted the mountain over the heads of the people and threatened them with death, while it was only ratified later, in the time of Purim, when the people “established and accepted it upon themselves.”
Read 11 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
27 Oct
What happens when we read Heidegger and Adam Smith together on the motif of invisible hands?
I tried my hand at it to find out.

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/invisible-ha…
The one was a Scottish classical liberal, while the latter was a German conservative. The one ascribed to what Isaiah Berlin calls negative liberty, while the latter believed in positive liberty.

Yet both thinkers founded their work on the metaphor of the hand.
Critics of classical liberalism are right to suggest that belief in markets requires a kind of faith. What they often miss is that this belief also requires a sense of tradition. Things work not because they are unbreakable, but because they are capable of being reconstructed.
Read 6 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
26 Oct
Forthcoming on my Substack: A comparison of Adam Smith's theory of the Invisible Hand with Heidegger's concept of Vorhandensein ("Readiness to hand"), both metaphors for tacit knowledge.

The motif of hands is under explored in the history of philosophy.
Consider this a handout for a PhD dissertation 👋
Here's another one: Comparing the motif of hands in Western thought to that of Talmudic thought.

The Mishna's tractate on the laws of shabbat begins with the image of people moving their hands across domains, e.g., a beggar extending his hand to a home owner or vice versa...
Read 16 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
25 Oct
If you want to understand today's culture wars, study the moment when pagan Rome became Christian.

Then read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as two ways of dealing with the cognitive dissonance of being both an imperial power and a self-perceived victim.

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/constantines…
If Nietzsche thought Christians needed to become unChristian, Kierkegaard thought they needed to become truly Christian. If Nietzsche thought the problem was Christianity, obstructing a pagan truth, Kierkegaard thought the problem was paganism, obstructing a Christian one.
An imperial victim remains an emperor. The early Church Fathers who fasted in the desert found solace in the trials of their marginalization.
Read 6 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
21 Oct
The problem for Hegel is not that liberalism is empty of a conception of the good, but that its conception of the good does not take sufficient account of the “struggle for recognition.” Critics (and defenders) of liberalism are strongest when they take aim at utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism isn’t empty; it’s thick. The problem is that it defines the good in terms of “hedons”—but pleasure and fulfillment are more complex than registering dopamine hits.
We still haven’t cracked the Nietzchean nut that sometimes terrible experiences *can be sources of great learning, joy, and growth.
Read 4 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
19 Oct
Yes and no:

Clock-time is a man made concept, but man is a time made concept.
Protagoras says, “Man is the measure of all things.”

Modern self help days, “You manage what you measure.”

Ergo: Man is the manager of all things (that can be measured).
The history of time is the history of time management and time measurement— from the sundial to the lunar and solar calendars to the clock tower to Greenwich Mean Time to the alarm app on your phone.
Read 16 tweets

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