Abstract
In an article published in 1980, Warren Zev Harvey suggests an analytical and historical description of modern Jewish confrontation with the philosophy and personality of Moses Maimonides.1 Harvey separates the historical figure of the great teacher as model and symbol from his philosophical and theological doctrines. In so doing he discovers a profound devotion on the part of modern Jewish philosophers to the values they find in the figure of their great medieval predecessor. Above all, Maimonides offers those philosophers a Jewish form of medieval enlightenment.2 On the other hand, analyzing the philosophical content of those modern Jewish writings, Harvey reaches the conclusion that those thinkers share very little of philosophy in common with Maimonides. This paradoxical attitude is understood by Harvey as one that defines modern Jewish thought in general but that is at the same time one even more typical of those thinkers who belong to German rationalist and idealist traditions. Among these he mentions Solomon Maimon, about whom he claims that “his brilliant Transcendentalphilosophie is a contribution to Kantian theory, not Maimonideanism.”3
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References
Harvey (1980), 249–68.
This fact is most clearly shown in the Maimonidean attributes Mendelssohn and Maimon took upon themselves or had bestowed on them by their Jewish environment. One can recall the way Solomon ben Joshua of Litauen adopted the name Maimon. But Mendelssohn too, who was apparently much less interested in such an honor, received it anyway from his contemporary Jews, who named him RAMBAMAN — Rabbi Moses ben Menachem, which his off course a direct repetition of the most popular epithet given to Moses ben Maimon in the Jewish tradition - RAMBAM.
Harvey (1980), 249. Samuel Hugo Bergman has similarly suggested that even Maimon’s Hebrew commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed is no more than a pretext for Maimon to develop his own Kantian teaching. And see Bergman (1945), 484.
Lachterman (1992); Schulte (1998); Hayoun (1997).
Atlas (1948), 49.
Maimon himself emphasizes the ethical influence on him of Maimonides throughout his life. See Leben, I, 307f.
Leben,I, 305–454. It is important to note that the chapters the author chose to place in the central part of the book, were usually neglected by editors of the work. In most editions they were treated as an appendix and were moved to the end of the work in order not to interrupt the autobiographical narrative. In other editions, including the Schocken edition of 1935 these chapters were simply omitted!
Such analysis of the role Mendelssohn plays between German and Jewish cultures was already suggested in Levy (1972), 44–52. But it might also be seen in the description of Mendelssohn provided by Maimon himself. See also Leben, I, 472–490.
On the great gap between Maimon’s expectations of Berlin and the reality he found there see Hayoun (1997), 38f.
At the end of his foreword Maimon gives the reader a hint as to his identity, playing on the initial letters of his name, which form the word S’BI, which in Hebrew means “captivity.” See Giv’at Hammore,5.
Although some Kantian ideas had been published by Isaak Euchel in HaMehasef as early as 1784; see Schulte (2002), 161ff.
Until the nineteenth century the most modern version available to the European reader was the Latin translation of Iohannes Buxtorf (Rabbi Mosis Majemonidis liber Doctor perplexorum, Basel, 1629) replacing the medieval Latin version printed by Giustinianus in Paris, 1520.
Maimonides (1999), 175.
Giv ‘at Hammore,4.
On the philosophical esoteric interpretation of the Guide in medieval literature see Ravitzky (1996).
See Atlas (1948), 18ff.
Maimonides (1999), 167.
Ibid.
Such an argument is typical of Maimonides: he leads his Orthodox opponents “ad absurdum”, to the extreme position in order to reveal the non-orthodox results that might be deduced from their own reasoning.
On God seen by Spinoza as a material cause see Wolfson (1969), 296–330. Wolfson, analyzing prop. 16–18 of the Ethic and I.3 of the Short Treaty accepts Spinoza’s explicit claim rejecting both the finality of divine causation as well as any other teleological mechanism. For a more critical analysis see Forsyth (1972).
Albert (1976), 11: “Die Hauptform des mittelalterlichen Pantheismus,…, scheint durch die Lehre charakterisiert zu sein, Gott sei als der Seiende schlechthin und das Sein selbst das ”esse formale“ des innerweltlichen Seiendes, d.h. das Sein einzelnen Seienden, das es in seiner Einzelhaftigkeit konstituiert.”
That is of course only if we ignore the somewhat obscure claim of Spinoza himself in the Ethics (second part, note to proposition VII), and see Spinoza (1959), 42: “Thus also a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two manners, which certain of the Jews seem to have perceived but confusedly, for they said that God and his intellect and the things conceived by his intellect were one and the same thing.”
For a discussion of the relationship between Spinoza and Maimonides on that issue see Goodman (1988). See also Schwartz (1997).
Here one should mention especially the detailed analysis of Buzaglo (1992). Buzaglo attacks almost all traditional interpretations of Maimon because they fail to grasp Maimon’s highly modern formulation of mathematical problems which therefore reformulated his thought into some sort of pre-Kantian rationalist system typical of the 17th century. Many of Buzaglo’s suggestions are more than convincing; nevertheless this failure occurs mostly when the interpreter does not analyze the rhetorical formulations in their concrete philosophical setting. On doing so it becomes clear which new meanings a “traditional” claim (say one taken from Leibniz, Spinoza or Maimonides) might gain in a new speculative (post Kantian) setting. In the present paper however I am interested less in an overall perspective of Maimon’s philosophical ingenuity and much more in his separate rhetorical moves and their cultural background.
See Hayoun (1997), 63.
Leben, I,490.
See Buzaglo (1992), 193; Engstler (1990), 83: „Maimons Interpretation der Kantischen Schematismuslehre wird noch verdeutlicht durch eine Ausführung in seinem direkt im Anschluss an den,Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie’ entstandenen Kommentar zu Maimonides’,Führer der Unschlüssigen’.“
Giv’at Hammore,107.
Maimonides develops in that place a rather complicated discussion that Mai- mon interprets in accordance with some cabalistic interpretation (esp. Abulafia) but also in an argumentation which is almost similar to the one suggested by medieval German thinkers as Albertus Magnus and Meister Eckhart. All those interpretations point on the similarity between the Tetragrammaton as a signifier of God’s special existence and the notion of existence that Maimonides develops in Chapter 63 in his interpretation of Exod. 3:14. See Giv’at Hammore, 94f. On the medieval scholastic interpretations of those chapters of the Guide see Schwartz (1996).
Giv’at Hammore,108.
Ibid., 109.
Which he will later in 1793 describes at length in a German essay published in the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde and see Maimon, „Auszug aus Jordan Bruno von Nola. Von der Ursache, dem Prinzip und dem Einen,“ IV, 617–652.
Giv’at Hammore,110; for a recent discussion of the relation between mediaeval pantheism and Bruno’s ideas see Grün (1999).
Giv’at Hammore, ibid.
Giv’at Hammore,158–166; Mendelssohn (1968), 392–412;
Gin ‘at Hammore,161.
Ibid. Maimon repeats here the thesis of Wachter brought by Mendelssohn on the same place. On Maimon’s formulation of cabalistic ideas see Leben, I, 127ff.; Engstler (1994), 167.
Jacobi (1998), 20. Mendelssohn (1968), chap. 13; For Wolfs’ Critique see Scholz (1916), XLIIILVII.
a full Hebrew translation of the text by J. Herzenberg was published in Königsberg in 1845.
Giv’at Hammore,165.
See Atlas (1948), 20; Bransen (1991), 91–133.
In III, 340–350.
Ibid., 348f.: “Wie kann man dabey gleichgültig seyn, wenn man das tiefsinnigste System des Spinoza bloß durch einige superfeine Distinktionen in Ansehung der Begriffe von Substanz und Freiheit über den Haufen zu werfen vorgiebt, da doch ein jeder, der in der Metaphysik Dogmatiker seyn will, zuletzt darauf kommen muß.”
On the similarity of these two problems see Tr, II, 62: `Wollen wir die Sache genauer betrachten, so werden wir finden, dass die Frage ‘quid juris?’ mit der wichtigen Frage die alle Philosophen von jeher beschäftigt hat, nämlich die Erklärung der Gemeinschaft zwischen Seele und Körper, oder auch mit dieser, die Erklärung von Entstehung der Welt (ihrer Materie nach) von einem Intelligenz; einerlei ist.“; Buzaglo (1992), 63, 109.
Bacher, Brann and Simonsen (1971), 131f.; Bruckstein (forthcoming).
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Schwartz, Y. (2003). Causa Materialis: Solomon Maimon, Moses Ben Maimon and the Possibility of Philosophical Transmission. In: Freudenthal, G. (eds) Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic. Studies in German Idealism, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2936-9_6
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