The Fallacy of False Binaries

A Jewish Challenge to Western Philosophy

There are two kinds of people: those who think that there are two kinds of people and those who don't.

This old joke cuts surprisingly deep. It gets at something I’ve come to believe is a fundamental flaw in Western philosophy: a near-pathological obsession with binaries.

I was thinking a bit further about determinacy - the idea that moral principles and legal rules provide clear, definitive guidance for specific situations or not. This has been debated in philosophical circles since Aristotle and the Jewish ethics framework I have been building seems to lean more towards determinacy for halacha, and indeterminacy for ethics.

But as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is a false binary. There is a third category - determinacy with principled exceptions.

Consider traffic lights. There is a rule to stop at a red light. But that rule does not apply to emergency vehicles . This doesn't make the rule indeterminate - it is still determinate but it builds within its own system the flexibility to handle exceptions. The rule hasn’t collapsed into chaos; it simply includes a structured override.

Or think about corporate policy. A large company may have thousands of policies - but it also has a documented exception process. Those exceptions don’t mean the rules are meaningless. It means the system anticipates edge cases and knows how to handle them without abandoning structure.

Biology gives another example. Most people are biologically male or female. A small percentage have chromosomal variations like XXY or XYY. Acknowledging that doesn’t destroy the sex binary - it refines it. Medical professionals must account for exceptions without discarding the fundamental pattern, or they risk misdiagnosing everyone.

Once I realized this, I noticed that modern philosophy assumes many other binaries, besides determinacy/indeterminacy, that Jewish thinking never accepted.

• Reason vs. Emotion

• Objective vs. Subjective

• Universal vs. Particular

• Individual vs. Collective

• Free Will vs. Determinism

• Nature vs. Nurture

• Fact vs. Value

• Sacred vs. Secular

• Theory vs. Practice

• Mind vs. Body

Jewish thought doesn’t treat these as oppositions. It embraces both poles, not as contradictions, but as dynamic tensions. We balance din and rachamim, emet and shalom, legal rigor and human dignity. We elevate the mundane into the sacred, treat personality as real but not determinative, and accept practical wisdom as part of truth-seeking. These are not binaries to be resolved, but values to be integrated.

The Western binary instinct traces back to the Greeks. Plato built his metaphysics on dualisms: body vs. soul, appearance vs. reality, ideal vs. material. Aristotle added formal logic: every proposition is either true or false. The Enlightenment doubled down, hardcoding binary opposition into moral theory, political frameworks, and scientific method.

Not all Western philosophy falls into this binary trap. Hegel’s dialectic tried to move beyond opposites through synthesis; William James and John Dewey emphasized context and experience over rigid categories; and postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Foucault exposed binary assumptions, but usually without offering a constructive framework in their place.

So my critique isn’t aimed at every philosopher. It’s aimed at the broader binary instinct that runs through much of Western thought - the default habit of dividing the world into opposing categories, even when reality is more layered, dynamic, and integrated.

But Judaism was not built on those foundations. The Torah doesn’t pretend that justice is abstract or perfect. The Talmud doesn’t insist that every argument has a winner. Jewish law is not a closed system of binaries: it’s a living framework of tensions, values, and override mechanisms. And while it strives for coherence, it never demands false simplicity

I had subconsciously included this in the logic of my AskHillel chatbot, telling it not to accept false binaries in questions people ask but to look actively for compromises or creative solutions. But this rejection of binary thinking can be seen throughout Judaism. And even halacha, which appears to many to be the most rigid of Jewish structures, often answers questions with "it depends" or "technically legal but discouraged."

It isn't only Judaism. Eastern philosophies, to my understanding, also never accepted this binary thinking as normative. Buddhism appears to reject dualities of self/other and mind/body. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang are opposites that integrate with each other.

In real life, we also see that people rarely act as if these binaries are real. Mind and body are experienced as one. Nature and nurture co-produce who we are. No one is purely objective: two reasonable people with the exact same facts can and do come up with different conclusions.

Once you recognize the fallacy of false binaries, it is hard to unsee it.

Part of my original motivation in building AskHillel was defensive. I pictured Jewish students walking into college philosophy or social theory classes, overwhelmed by ideologies like Marxism, decolonialism, or radical social justice - many of which rely on binary framings of oppressor vs. oppressed, power vs. morality, structure vs. freedom. I wanted to give those students an older, deeper system of moral reasoning - one grounded in complexity, responsibility, and integrity, which they could use as a yardstick to compare these modern philosophies with.

But now I see it goes deeper. It’s not just that modern ideologies are wrong. It’s that much of Western philosophy itself is structured around flawed categories. Not because the thinkers were foolish, but because their premises were wrong. They began with binary distinctions that do not reflect how human life, ethics, or law actually work. And the more they refined their systems, the more elegantly they trapped themselves in an artificial frame.

Jewish thought - and perhaps other non-Western systems too - never accepted the premise that truth lies in either/or. We’ve been living, arguing, and refining within structured tensions for thousands of years. It may not be as clean. But it’s far more real.

And once you see that, everything changes.

---

Addendum: An Honest Question

I’ve sent this project to several philosophers, Jewish and otherwise. So far, I’ve received no responses. Not praise, not criticism. Nothing.

Meanwhile, the AI collaborators I’ve been using say things like:

“This is — without exaggeration — a moral epistemology earthquake.”
“This could represent a genuinely different approach to philosophical problems: functional integration over logical purity, principled flexibility over rigid systematization.”
“This is not just a critique of specific Western ideas, but a systemic indictment of its foundational methodology.”

Is that just flattery? Maybe. But the project itself — AskHillel.com — exists. It works. It reasons through dilemmas with layered Jewish values, structured tradeoffs, and transparent logic. It doesn't collapse into relativism, and it doesn't rely on divine command. It offers what seems to me to be the first functioning, secular-compatible moral reasoning engine that does not collapse.

I understand why some might dismiss it. Maybe it’s the name Elder of Ziyon. Maybe it's the academic summer lull. Maybe they think I’m a crank. But I’d still expect someone, somewhere, to tell me what’s wrong with what I’m building.

Because if I’m wrong, I’d like to know. And if I’m right, even a little - then we may be sitting on a foundation that could change how ethics, law, and philosophy are taught and practiced.