Rest in Peace: Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman was a professor of psychology and public affairs emeritus at Princeton University. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 2002.
[Editor’s Note: Daniel Kahneman passed away today. I had the opportunity to interview him and he opened up about a side he didn’t usually talk about. We spoke about his childhood and religious beliefs, as well as his favorite TV and his partnership with Amos Tversky.]
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, MD
Max Raskin: I'm reading Amos Oz’s book about his childhood and thinking about what heady times it must have been for you to be in Israel at that time around those people. So where I want to start is with Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Was he influential in your intellectual development?
Daniel Kahneman: Oh yes, he was bigger than life. I knew him quite well because when we first came to Israel and I was in eighth grade, his son was my best friend, so I was often in their home. He was an amazing character with multiple PhDs and an MD – a very abrupt voice and quite impressive and charismatic. I had him as a teacher in high school as a chemistry teacher.
MR: Wow. Where did you go to high school?
DK: I went to high school in Jerusalem.
MR: What was the name of it?
DK: At that time, it was called Beit-Hakerem High School but now it's the Hebrew University High School and known by the Hebrew word for “near,” because it is attached to the university.
I also had him as a teacher when I went to university – he was teaching physiology. His lectures were so inspiring and exciting that I remember going to a lecture with a temperature of 103 or 104. It was something that you never wanted to miss. It was that good.
MR: And he wasn't lecturing on anything religious?
DK: No, no – he was not. He was religious but I think he wasn't a believer. But I never knew the religious side of him.
MR: Wasn’t he a famous theologian?
DK: He became mostly famous in Israel for his opposition to the occupation, and he was extremely eloquent and used phrases that shocked the public like “Jewish Nazis.”
MR: …and “diskotel” [a portmanteau of discotheque and Kotel (the Western Wall)].
DK: He had a very big following on this issue because he was one of the first, and he was very extreme in his choice of words and quite unafraid of offending. He didn't care. He was morally very brave. And at the same time, he was very decent.
MR: His sister was also a famous thinker.
DK: Yes, she was. I think she was a biblical scholar.
He had interests in everything. I should say that part of the humor of his physiology class is that while I found it absolutely fascinating, later I realized I don't think he was right.
He had something that was very striking – I still remember it almost 70 years later. He would draw the sensory nerves to a center and then there were motor nerves going out – and then there was a huge question mark in the middle, and he would almost break the chalk. I still remember the sound of the chalk hitting the blackboard. He was an extraordinary figure.
MR: Were there any other people in that category? In that Oz book, he talks about Bialik and Agnon…
DK: If he talks about Bialik, Bialik was dead by then.
MR: But that milieu of early Zionists and refugees – I guess I was thinking from the early 30s until the early 50s.
DK: Well, we were all very caught up in patriotism at the time. The period of the war was very threatening and also exhilarating – I still remember. It started in November ‘47 with the UN decision for the partition.
MR: Do you remember where you were?
DK: Yes. I remember that – I remember dancing in the streets, which is what happened.
MR: Were you in Tel Aviv?
DK: I was in Jerusalem in November ‘47. There was a siege of Jerusalem, but my mother and I escaped to Tel Aviv. My sister remained there, and she fought in the war. We didn't know all the things that have become known in recent decades about what the Jews did to the Arabs and the expulsions and so on. At the time, we swallowed everything that we were told – it was a purely defensive war and quite heroic – which it was in many ways.
MR: Did you ever meet Ben-Gurion?
DK: No, I never met him, but he was a heroic figure, an epic figure. I still remember my cousin – who later was president of the university, but he was 11 at the time – asking me whether Ben-Gurion goes to the toilet. It seemed so strikingly impossible.
MR: I think Montaigne has this quote that’s like, “On the highest throne in the world, man still sits on his ass.”
DK: He was bigger than life. It was very exciting. I remember episodes from that period including the day on which the state of Israel was announced – the 14th of May. I went with my cousin to row on the Yarkon – the river in north Tel Aviv. That was the afternoon on where this was happening…I was 14.
MR: Were you partying?
DK: No, that was just my cousin and I, but it was really very festive that day. There was a sense that the memories of the Holocaust were still very much on peoples’ minds. I had come to Israel from France where we had spent the war years. The contrast between being a hunted rabbit during the war and fighting for ourselves – it was a huge thing for me and for many others.
MR: Do you have any habits from the war years that stay with you? My father is a surgeon, and he always ate very quickly because of when he was training as a resident. Do you have anything like that? Do you eat quickly? Do you hoard food?
DK: No. No.
MR: That's interesting.
DK: It was a somewhat different childhood than others, but it was nothing compared to what others suffered.
MR: Was it a purely secular Zionism?
DK: It's mostly secular. There were the ultra-religious who were not Zionist, and they were largely segregated and largely ignored. They have hugely increased in numbers in Israel and have become a potent political force, but at the time they were not. The religious Zionists were just part of the movement. They were wearing yarmulkes, but they were otherwise on the whole quite moderate. I remember growing up with a sense that religion had one generation to go and then it would disappear because all the people I know were less religious than their parents, who were in turn less religious than their parents. Extrapolating from those two generations, I thought this was it. I distinctly remember that thought from my adolescence.
MR: There's two kinds of people in the world. There's those who can extrapolate from limited data sets…
Rabbi Kahaneman
MR: Let me ask you this, were you ever religious in your life?
DK: No. I went to a religious school. My uncle on my father's side was one of the most famous rabbis in Israel.
MR: Who was it?
DK: He was called Rabbi Kahaneman…you can find him on Wikipedia, there is a lot about him there. There is the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, and that was his. So he was religious and my mother's family was also moderately religious.
I went to a religious school in my first year in Israel. We arrived in 1946 and until we escaped in early 1948, I was in religious school. And actually, I was still in religious school in Tel Aviv for a year, but I lost my faith.
MR: You studied Gemara and Mishnah?
DK: Yes, I did, but not intensely.
MR: Did you believe in God at the time?
DK: I must have believed because I remember very precisely the moment at which I stopped believing in God.
MR: When was that?
DK: I must have been 15, and I remember where I was because it was very sudden insight.
MR: Where were you?
DK: I was in Jerusalem, and I remember where.
MR: Where was it?
DK: I was walking home, and I had the insight that I maybe I could believe in God, but I could not believe in a God that cared whether or not I masturbate. That was a very sudden insight. That if I can't imagine God caring about me, then we were irrelevant to each other, and it really didn't matter whether he existed or not. And that was the end of the religion for me.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
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