Abstract
In order to comprehend how metaphor operates at the level of human understanding, this chapter undertakes an analysis of medieval Jewish engagement with Fārābı̄an and Avicennian psychology. Both Halevi and Maimonides operate within the Arabic Aristotelian paradigm; however, imagination plays different, yet vital, roles in the theology of each Jewish thinker.
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Notes
- 1.
Dmitri Gutas, “Imagination and Transcendental Knowledge in Avicenna,” in Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy: From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank. (Leuven and Paris: Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies, 2006), 339. In mysticism, the imaginative faculty is the conduit for “transcendent realities” which are made into “concrete and tangible symbols envisioned by a mystic…The world of the imaginal is an intermediary realm wherein the imaginative forms (or archetypal images) symbolize the intelligible in terms of the sensory.” Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 61–62.
- 2.
Aristotle explains that all animals have perception, and see objects with their eyes (De Anima iii 12, 434a22 – 434b18), but animals do not have understanding because they cannot reason. Perception is always true, but understanding, because one can think or reason erroneously, can be false.
- 3.
For Aristotle’s treatment of imagination (phantasia), see J.I. Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Alcmaeon to Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906); Stephen Everson, Aristotle on Perception (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997); D.W. Hamlyn, trans., Aristotle De Anima Books II and III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Martha C. Nussbaum and Amelie O. Rorty, eds., Essays on Aristotle’s “De Anima” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Malcolm Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” in Aristotle on Mind and the Senses: Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University Press, 1988); Michael V. Wedin, Mind and Imagination in Aristotle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
- 4.
Although Aristotle does not explain here how metaphor is differentiated from “an image that occurs to us,” it is useful to note that in the Poetics , Aristotle describes the role of metaphor , but does not mention phantasia , imagination, as a component in the discourse of poetics. Nabil Matar writes that Alfārābī, in his Treatise on Poetry, is “the first Muslim philosopher to link Aristotle’s discussion of imagination in De Anima to poetics.” Nabil Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination: With a Translation of His ‘Treatise on Poetry,’” College Literature 23, no. 1 (1996): 101, 104.
- 5.
Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1993), 53.
- 6.
Aristotle , De Anima , trans. Hamlyn, 54. Sara Newman explains that perception is a physical response: “For Aristotle, then, perception is a response to external stimuli registered in an organ which does not mobilize mental activities involving judgment, or belief, or truth-values on the part of the perceiving individual.” Sara Newman, Aristotle and Style (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 125.
- 7.
Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 102. Wedin defines “supposition” as “taking something to be the case.” Since imagination cannot affirm or deny something, but merely [re]presents that which it takes to be the case, it is not the same as supposition. Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 105–06.
- 8.
Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 102.
- 9.
“That which can think, therefore, thinks the forms in images .” Aristotle, De Anima, iii 8, 432a7–8.
- 10.
Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 110.
- 11.
Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 113.
- 12.
See M.W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1927), 83–176; Lara Harb, “Poetic Marvels: Wonder and Aesthetic Experience in Medieval Arabic Literary Theory” (PhD diss., New York University, 2013); Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
- 13.
See Jon McGinnis, Avicenna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 89–148; F. Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology: An English Translation of Kitāb al-Najāt, Book II, Chapter VI, with Historico-Philosophical Notes and Textual Improvements on the Cairo Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1952).
- 14.
Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination,” 106.
- 15.
Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination,” 106.
- 16.
Harb writes, “muhakat [mimesis] is the poetic process through which takhyīl [creative imagining] is achieved. Or, as Walid Hamarneh has put it, takhyīl revolves around the ‘reception’ of poetry and muhakat is the ‘poetic text’ itself through which a certain ‘reception’ is achieved.” Harb, Poetic Marvels, 20; see also Harb, Poetic Marvels, 20 n. 46.
- 17.
For example, Cantarino translates the root kh-y-l as “to believe,” with the added connotation of a “wrong or unfounded belief or opinion,” a fancy. Vincente Cantarino, Arabic Poetics in the Golden Age (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), 80.
- 18.
Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination,” 101–02, 106.
- 19.
Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination,” 100.
- 20.
Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination,” 104.
- 21.
Dahiyat explains that for Avicenna, “imaginative” poetry involves both “imitative” (following Aristotle’s emphasis on imitation and likeness in poetic expression) and “emotive” (as opposed to instructive and purely rational) elements. Ismail M. Dahiyat, Avicenna’s Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle: A Critical Study with an Annotated Translation of the Text (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), 61n1.
- 22.
“Poetry is an imaginatively creative [mukhayyil] discourse consisting of rhythmic and equipoised locutions which, among the Arabs, are also rhymed.” Avicenna, Kitab ash-shi’r, quoted in Cantarino, Arabic Poetics, 74.
- 23.
Avicenna’s psychology can be found in Kitāb al-Najat, Book II, Chapter VI, and Shifā’, Book VI. For translation of the former, see Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology. For an introduction to Avicenna, see McGinnis, Avicenna. On Avicenna’s psychology, in particular his schematic of the internal senses , see Deborah L. Black, “Imagination and Estimation: Arabic Paradigms and Western Transformations,” Topoi 19 (2000): 59–75; Herbert A. Davidson , Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 93–95; Gutas, “Imagination and Transcendental Knowledge”; E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute University of London, 1975), 21–30, 39–52; Kemp, Cognitive Psychology, 52–60; McGinnis, Avicenna, 89–148; Harry A. Wolfson , “The Internal Senses in Latin , Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts,” in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–1977), 276–281.
- 24.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 30.
- 25.
Avicenna calls this the “faculty of fantasy.” Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 31.
- 26.
Kemp calls this “image store” rather than “imagination.” He prefers to describe its function as a warehouse of images . He only uses the term imagination to describe the process by which mental images are recalled and imagery is visualized. Kemp, Cognitive Psychology, 52–53. Franz Brentano, summarizing Aristotle’s psychology , writes, “the capacity to have images is called imagination.” Franz Brentano, The Psychology of Aristotle: In Particular His Doctrine of the Active Intellect, ed. and trans. Rolf George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 67.
- 27.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 31.
- 28.
Dmitri Gutas, “Intellect without Limits: The Absence of Mysticism in Avicenna,” in Intellect et imagination dans la Philosophie Médiéval / Intelecto e imaginaçâo na Filosofia Médiéval: Actes du Xte Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale de la Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (S.I.E.P.M.), Porto, du 26 au 31 août 2002 (Rencontres de philosophie médiévale, 11), vol. 1, eds. Maria Cândida Pacheco and José Francisco Meirinhos (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2006), 356–57.
- 29.
Gutas, “Intellect without Limits,” 356–57.
- 30.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 31.
- 31.
Salim Kemal , The Philosophical Poetics of Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 48.
- 32.
Also called the “compositive” imagination because it combines both “sensitive” (of the senses) and rational (of the intellect) imagination . Since “we do not attain knowledge simply by empirical experience but through actualizing the intellect,” the compositive imagination “provides a means for reaching knowledge, but it is not itself knowledge.” Kemal , Philosophical Poetics, 125.
- 33.
From Shifā’: De anima 1:5, 45, quoted in Black, “Imagination and Estimation,” 70n11.
- 34.
Black, “Imagination and Estimation,” 60.
- 35.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 31.
- 36.
For a discussion of the estimative faculty , or wahm, see Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 79–83; Black, “Imagination and Estimation”; Deborah L. Black, “Estimation (Wahm) in Avicenna: The Logical and Psychological Dimensions,” Dialogue 32 (1993): 219–58.
- 37.
Gutas, “Imagination and Transcendental Knowledge,” 339.
- 38.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 69.
- 39.
In De Anima iii 5, 430a14–19, Aristotle writes, “And there is an intellect which is of this kind by becoming all things, and there is another which is so by producing all things, as a kind of disposition, like light, does; for in a way light too makes colours which are potential into actual colours. And this intellect is distinct, unaffected, and unmixed, being in essence activity.”
- 40.
See Aristotle Metaphysics xii, 9 on the nature of divine thought, and for a discussion on divine thought in Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 236–239.
- 41.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 35–36.
- 42.
Ashya’ mutakhayyila. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 93.
- 43.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 31.
- 44.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 102.
- 45.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 37. For a discussion of prophecy according to Avicenna, see Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 116–26.
- 46.
For a discussion of the implications of “false images/imaginings,” see Chap. 4 in this book.
- 47.
Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 118.
- 48.
Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 119. See also Maimonides on prophecy, Guide, II:45.
- 49.
Kitāb al-radd wa al-dalīl fī al-dīn al-dhalīl (The Book of Refutation and Proof on behalf of the Despised Religion) was written in Judeo-Arabic around 1110 and translated into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon in Granada c. 1140. For the transmission and reception of the Kuzari , see Adam Shear, The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Yehuda Even Shmuel, Introduction to the Hebrew translation of Sefer ha-Kuzari le-rabbi Yehuda ha-Levi (Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing, 1994). For the cultural background of the Kuzari , see Ehud Krinis, “The Arabic Background of the Kuzari,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 21, no. 1 (2013): 1–56.
- 50.
Halevi, Kuzari, 3:4.
- 51.
The following are the English (from the English translation by Lawrence V. Berman and Barry S. Kogan)/Judeo-Arabic (from the Judeo-Arabic edition by Wolfson)/Hebrew terms (from the Hebrew edition of Judah ibn Tibbon in Hirschfeld): The commons sense /al-h.iss al-mushtarak/ha-hargasha ha-mishtatefet; imagination/takhayyul /ha-yetser; estimation/wahm/ha-ra‘ayon; cogitation/fikra/ha-meḥashev; memory/dhikra/ha-zikaron. Judah Halevi, The Kuzari: The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion, trans. Berman and Kogan (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
- 52.
Similar to the Arabic al-ayn al-batiniyya and Latin oculus imaginationis. Aaron Hughes, The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 82. For a discussion of al-amr al-ilahi in Halevi, see Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 190ff.; Barry S. Kogan, “Judah Halevi and His Use of Philosophy in the Kuzari ,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 111–135; Diana Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Yochanan Silman, Philosopher and Prophet: Judah Halevi, the Kuzari , and the Evolution of His Thought, trans. Lenn J. Schramm (Albany: State University of New York, 1995).
- 53.
Halevi, Kuzari , 3:5. It appears from the Judeo -Arabic terms that Halevi has mixed up these faculties, or, as Davidson writes, is “carelessly” relying on notes or his own memory of prior readings, lessons or conversations. Although Davidson critiques Halevi as having a sloppy grasp of Arabic Aristotelian cosmology and theory of intellect, he does credit him with a sound understanding of Avicennian psychology ; this citation, however, proves otherwise. Davidson , Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 187. See also Harry A. Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 1, eds. Isadore Twersky and George H. Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 285–86. For a supportive view of Halevi’s understanding of Arabic philosophical terms, see Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 137–38.
- 54.
See Aristotle, De Anima iii, 10.
- 55.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 32.
- 56.
This is in contrast with the theoretical faculty of the rational soul, whose function it is to obtain knowledge. See Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 33. Also see Hughes, Texture of the Divine, 91–93, for a good summary of Avicenna’s psychology of the human soul.
- 57.
For an analysis of the development of Halevi’s thought in the Kuzari , see Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy; Raymond Scheindlin, The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimmage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Silman, Philosopher and Prophet.
- 58.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:2.
- 59.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:2.
- 60.
Someone to whom the divine order (al-amr al-ilāhī) is attached. On the “divine order” in Halevi see Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes; Kogan, “Judah Halevi,” 111–35; Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy; Silman, Philosopher and Prophet.
- 61.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:2.
- 62.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:2.
- 63.
In Halevi’s time, the sun was thought to move around the earth and not vice versa.
- 64.
Halevi, Kuzari , 4:2. This dialogue parallels Avicenna’s discussion concerning the human soul, particularly how the rational soul acquires knowledge. See Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 34. See Kuzari, 1:1 for the Philosopher’s/Halevi’s concise summation of Arabic Aristotelian epistemology.
- 65.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:2.
- 66.
Avicenna explains that this act of cognition occurs when the compositive imagination works in tandem with reason. Avicenna, Shifā’: Al-Nafs: Book V. 5, trans. D.L. Black.
- 67.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:3.
- 68.
Lobel explains that Halevi describes this variously as “the inner sense (al-ḥiss al-bāṭin), an inner eye (‘ayn bāṭina), a vision (baṣar) clearer than logic (qiyās), and the spiritual eye (al-‘ayn al-ruḥaniyya) by which prophets were made superior (fuḍḍilū). Halevi also explains that this inner eye ‘might almost be said to be’ the imaginative faculty (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila) insofar as it serves (supplies) the intellect.” Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 219n3. Al-Ghazzālī (1058–1111) uses the metaphor of blindness to compare a person who is incapable of believing the veracity of prophecy to a blind person who does not understand what colour is. Ibn Ṭufayl (1105–1185) repeats this metaphor to describe a blind person who is gradually instructed about colour; when God grants him sight, he finds colour to be everything he had imagined, but now he can see colour with clarity and joy. Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 105–106.
- 69.
Al-Fārābī, al-Madīna al-fāḍila, in Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 223n.29.
- 70.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 36.
- 71.
Rahman, Avicenna’s Psychology, 37.
- 72.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:3.
- 73.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:3.
- 74.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:3.
- 75.
“Ilhām,” Encyclopedia of Islam, s.v., “Ilhām”.
- 76.
In Alfārābī, prophetic reception is hierarchical: for the person of lower intellectual capacity, it enters the person’s imaginative faculty and allows him or her to foretell the future or to create a descriptive figuration of rational truths. For the person of a highly developed intellect, this revelation permits the person to undergo the same experience as the person of less developed intellect; however, this person’s human intellect conjoins with the active intellect, producing a direct intrinsic understanding of theoretical truths, unmediated by a reliance on figurative representation. Davidson , Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 116. For Alfārābī and Avicenna on prophecy , see Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 116–23, 185–86; McGinnis, Avicenna, 147–48.
- 77.
“Ilhām,” Encyclopedia of Islam.
- 78.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:3.
- 79.
Halevi, Kuzari , 4:17. In the Judeo-Arabic , “savouring, not reasoning” is: דוקא לא קיאסא/dhawq la qiyāsan. In Sufism, dhawq refers to an experiential type of knowledge that contrasts with theoretical knowledge. Al-Ghazzālī writes of attaining a level of knowledge when he studied with the Sufis that was “attainable…not by oral instruction and study, but by taste (dhawq) and [actually walking] the mystical path.” Ibn Ṭufayl also describes the two stages of his spiritual journey as comprising “study and theory…and now…the taste (dhawq) that comes in witness.” Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 95–96.
- 80.
Judeo-Arabic: אלקדימד קיאסאתא. Halevi, Kuzari, 4:17.
- 81.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:17.
- 82.
Halevi, Kuzari, 4:17.
- 83.
This describes wahmiyya as outlined by Avicenna.
- 84.
Otherwise known as the internal senses.
- 85.
Halevi, Kuzari, 5:12.
- 86.
Maimonides, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah, 8:1. Compare the Israelites’ experience idem with Moses’ experience as described by Maimonides in Guide II:33.
- 87.
In its cognitive capacity, the imaginative faculty will use images taken from the image store to “define and compare, analyze and create, thereby arriving at perceptive and abstractive knowledge.” Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination,” 104.
- 88.
Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia 1, 449b31. As translated in Harry A. Wolfson, “Maimonides on the Internal Senses ,” in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 1, eds. Isadore Twersky and G. H. Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 349.
- 89.
Sarah Klein-Braslavy , Perush ha-Rambam la-sipurim ʻal Adam be-farashat Be-reshit: Peraḳim be-torat ha-Adam shel ha-Rambam (Jerusalem: Ha-hevra le-heker ha-mikra be-Yisrael, 1986), 212–13. However, in Maimonides’ source, he specifies that those who imagine angels as embodied beings are following their evil inclination. The distinction between evil inclination and imagination is subtle, but makes all the difference in how we construe Maimonides’ attitude towards the imagination. Davidson , paraphrasing Klein-Braslavy’s interpretation of this aggadah, writes, “The most plausible interpretation of what [Maimonides] is suggesting is that Satan sitting astride the serpent represents the human imaginative faculty , which sits astride the soul’s faculties of sense perception , and the temptation of Eve, in its aggadic version, is an allegorical depiction of man’s psychological and moral condition: The imaginative faculty of the soul tempts the soul’s entire nonintellectual side, and if it succeeds in its blandishments, the nonintellectual side can seduce the intellect and deflect it from pursuing its natural goal.” Davidson’s use of the verbs “tempts,” “seduce” and “deflect” to describe the actions of the imaginative faculty implies a faculty that acts upon human rationality; like Satan , it entices reason and intellect in a manner that is difficult to withstand. Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 346.
- 90.
James A. Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutic of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in The Guide of the Perplexed (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 74. Specifically, Diamond describes the “sons of Elohim” of Genesis as “those who deviate from the rational faculty and become disciples of the imaginative.” It is only within the prophet’s mind that reason and imagination “operate in tandem,” and this amalgamation calls forth the prophet to lead the people and to instruct them. In the ensuing pages of his book, Diamond devises a graph that posits intellect in opposition to the imagination. Diamond , Maimonides and the Hermeneutic of Concealment, 75–76.
- 91.
Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutic of Concealment, 74.
- 92.
Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutic of Concealment, 181n42.
- 93.
In Chap. 4 of this book, I will show that this negative view comes out of a failure of translators of the Guide to fully render the nuances of Maimonides’ Judeo-Arabic text.
- 94.
Here I am not arguing against the body/intellect or reason/passion dichotomy, which has a long history in philosophical thought. See Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 140. Rather, my argument takes issue with the oversimplification of the term imagination in Maimonides’ translators and interpreters . Part of the problem lies with the lack of synonyms for the concept of imagination in both Hebrew and English; part lies with the interpreters’ generalization of the particularities of imagination, as understood by the Arabic Aristotelians . This flattening of the term omits the full nuances of human psychology as understood by Andalusī thinkers like Maimonides and, as I have shown above, Judah Halevi before him. As a result, subsequent interpreters of Maimonidean thought took up this oversimplification of imagination, dichotomized human psychology and posited reason and imagination against each other, with imagination – specifically sense perception – as a dangerous seducer ready to overwhelm intellectual thought within the psyche. This issue will be the primary focus of the next chapter.
- 95.
Sarah Stroumsa discusses Maimonides’ transmission of the ideas of his predecessors despite the apparent lack of attribution in Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 11ff.
- 96.
For a summary of Maimonides on the internal senses , see Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, 1:291–92. Wolfson concludes that Maimonides uses the general term imagination to cover all aspects of the internal senses .
- 97.
Maimonides, Guide, I:2.
- 98.
For Maimonides’ attitude towards poetry, see James Monroe, “Maimonides on the Mozarabic Lyric: A Note on the Muwassaha,” La Coronica 17, no. 2 (1988–89): 18–32; Angel Sáenz-Badillos, “Maimonides y la poesia,” in Sobre La Vida y Obra de Maimonides, ed. Jesús Peláez del Rosal, 483–495. (Córdoba: Ediciones el Almendro, 1991) 483–95; Hayyim Schirmann, “Maimonides and Hebrew Poetry” [Hebrew] Moznayim 3 (1935): 433–36; Yosef Tobi, Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry: Studies in Spanish Medieval Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 422–66; Yosef Yahalom, “Maimonides and Hebrew Poetry” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 81 (1999): 4–14.
- 99.
Mefursamot/al-mashhūrāt/in Greek endoxa (value judgments). See Pines’ translation of the Guide (24n7).
- 100.
Guide, I:2. The biblical verse is from Gen. 3:6.
- 101.
Hamlyn speaks for other critics of Aristotle’s treatment of imagination when he writes that “imagination has an unsatisfactory halfway status between perception and the intellect and its exact position is never made clear.” Quoted in Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 45.
- 102.
Guide, I:23.
- 103.
Guide, I:23.
- 104.
Whether or not imagination is a faculty independent of judgment is the subject of debate. Aristotle in De Anima iii 3, 428a1–4, writes, “If then imagination is that in virtue of which we say an image comes about in us and is not spoken of metaphorically, is it in one of those a faculty or disposition, in virtue of which we discriminate and are true and false? Such are perception, belief, knowledge and mind.” On this issue, see Kemal, Philosophical Poetics, 45; Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 47.
- 105.
Maimonides, Guide, I:2.
- 106.
Kemal, Philosophical Poetics, 45.
- 107.
Maimonides, Guide, I:28.
- 108.
Maimonides, Guide, I:31.
- 109.
Maimonides, Guide, I:31.
- 110.
Maimonides, Guide, I:31. Maimonides opines that there is less disagreement about natural science and none about mathematics, presumably because these subjects can be “known” and fully understood by human intellects .
- 111.
“That He is capable of motion.” Guide, I:46.
- 112.
Be-dimyono/al-takhayyul. Maimonides, Moreh ha-nebukhim: Dalālat al-ḥā‘irīn, trans. Joseph Kafiḥ (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-rav Kook, 1972), 100.
- 113.
This is in accordance with the notion that imagination is divided into two faculties: retentive (which preserves images received from the external senses) and compositive (which combines these images and presents them to the intellect). However, can imagination create an image of something it has never seen? And what is represented in imagination if not disembodied ideas? And is a disembodied thing, from the point of view of imagination, always nonexistent? From the point of view of a human being, the only place that something without a body can exist is in the imagination – is this not true?
- 114.
As in Exodus 3:20; 31:18. Maimonides, Guide, I:46.
- 115.
Maimonides, Guide, I:46. Similarly, in Kuzari 4:3, Halevi writes that we need images and parables in order to understand divine matters because these things cannot be understood using our intellect alone.
- 116.
Guide I:49, Pines 109.
- 117.
Hebrew and Arabic from Moses Maimonides, Moreh ha-nevukhim: Dalālat al-ḥāʻirīn, trans. Joseph Kafiḥ (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-rav Kook), 111.
- 118.
De Memoria et Reminiscentia 1, 449b31 and De Anima iii 7, 431a14–15. Quoted in Wolfson, “The Internal Senses,” 349.
- 119.
Black, “Imagination and Estimation,” 60. Contrast this with Wolfson’s contention that Maimonides agrees with Averroes, who, unlike Avicenna, understood “fikr … in the sense of human thinking and not in the sense of compositive human imagination.” Wolfson , “The Internal Senses,” 289.
- 120.
Wolfson, “The Internal Senses,” 291–92.
- 121.
(a) Ra’ayon or dimyon/takhayyul, (b) histaqlut/tafakkur, and (c) hitbonennut/tafahhum. Wolfson writes that the first two of these terms correspond to the Greek concepts of: phantasia or imagination, cogitation, and intelligentia or intellectus. Maimonides’ third term is conventionally listed as “memory” rather than “understanding.” Wolfson contends that Maimonides collapses Avicenna’s five internal senses into the above three, so that the common senses convey sense perception to the imagination, the imagination conveys images to the intellect, which then transforms these notions into apprehension. Harry A. Wolfson , “Maimonides on the Internal Senses,” in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–1977), 344–50.
- 122.
As quoted in Wolfson, “Maimonides on the Internal Senses,” 344–50.
- 123.
This issue was dealt with in Chap. 2.
- 124.
Maimonides, Guide, I:68.
- 125.
Maimonides, Guide, I:68.
- 126.
Maimonides, Guide, I:73.
- 127.
Maimonides, Guide, I:73.
- 128.
Maimonides, Guide, I:73.
- 129.
Aryeh L. Motzkin writes that Maimonides follows Aristotle’s Organon in his treatment of imagination , poetry and rhetoric in Part One of the Guide; Aristotle’s physical treatises, including De Anima in Part Two; and his Metaphysics and Politics in Part Three. In schematizing the Guide around the Aristotelian corpus, Motzkin downplays the philosophical contributions of the Arabic Aristotelians to medieval Jewish philosophy and the way in which Maimonides engages with these ideas in the Guide. (For an opposing view, see Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 207–09.) Aryeh L. Motzkin, “Maimonides and the Imagination,” in Philosophy and the Jewish Tradition: Lectures and Essays by Aryeh Leo Motzkin, ed. Yehuda Halper (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 38, 43–44.
- 130.
Guide, I:73. Motzkin translates the passage thus: “Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that something which the imagination posits with certainty, namely, that God is a body or a force in a body, is impossible. In the imagination there exist only bodies or bodily things.” Motzkin, “Maimonides and the Imagination,” 38.
- 131.
Aristotle, De Anima, iii 7, 431b2.
- 132.
Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 27.
- 133.
In his notes to De Anima III, Hamlyn describes Aristotle’s approach as “disjointed” (129), “problematic,” lacking cogency, and accuses him of exhibiting “little consistency” (131). Hamlyn’s critique of Aristotle is unhelpful, and demonstrates that he is a better translator than interpreter of Aristotle.
- 134.
For Arabic commentators on Aristotle’s psychology, see Black, “Imagination and Estimation”; Harvey, The Inward Wits; Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology; Wolfson, “The Internal Senses,” in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion.
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Roberts-Zauderer, D.L. (2019). “Taste and See:” Imagination and Intellect. In: Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29422-9_3
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