Abstract
A telling criticism of the mechanistic tradition in science is made by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his celebrated cosmological meditation, The Phenomenon of Man.1 Natural scientists have concerned themselves largely, perhaps exclusively, with just one of the two basic forms of energy of which we are aware, the outwardly directed or “tangential” energy by which bodies affect one another. The inwardly focused or “radial” energies by which things are centered and integrated in themselves and through which they are drawn, in seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, towards ever higher levels of complexity and integration, have been neglected or ignored. All energy, Teilhard remarks, almost incidentally, must be assumed to be psychic in nature. But the radial sort, as the foundation of heightened complexity, is the prototype of consciousness.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, Honolulu, 1987, and published in the proceedings.
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Notes
London: Collins, 1959, 62–66.
See Shmuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (London: Routledge Kegal Paul), 1959, 1–48.
See Enneads V 3.15; cf. III 8.10, 2; V 4.2, 38.
See Maimonides, Guide II 12; and cf. Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yagzän, tr. L.E. Goodman (Boston: Twayne, 1972; repr. Los Angeles, 1991), 125–127.
Guide III 16.
See Guide III 16; cf. 117, 28, II 13. Maimonides follows Saadiah’s lead in treating theodicy as one of the few legitimate problem areas in theology. He follows Aristotle himself, but more specifically the tradition we know as represented by al-Kindî and al-Amirî, in assimilating First Philosophy to theology. See Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1988) 238–53; Everett Rowson, A Muslim Philosopher on the Soul and its Fate. Of the two major families of issues addressed in the Guide to the Perplexed — the Account of Creation and the Account of the Chariot — Maimonides treats the former as a special case of the latter: The problems of cosmology and cosmogony (philosophical “Physics”) are a subset of the problems of theophany, God’s manifestation in finite terms (metaphysics or theology). Rival schools of thought — creationism, interventionistic occasionalism, the laissez faire theology of the Epicureans and the eternalistic naturalism of the Aristotelians — accordingly lead to corresponding positions with regard to providence and creation. The idea that the principal problem of metaphysics is the emergence of the many from the one is, of course, neoplatonic.
See Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies), 1978, 315–74.
Dillon traces the placement of the Forms in the mind of God as far back as the Middle Platonists and ultimately to Plato himself: The Middle Platonists 6, 95, 255, 410, with Timaeus 35A,Laws X. Plotinus fuses Aristotle’s Nous with Plato’s realm of forms, referring to the now content-filled thought-thinking-itself as Being. The synthesis of Alexander of Aphrodisias was crucial in making the transcendental intelligibles objects of the thought of Nous.
Metaphysics A 9, 991a8: “Above all one might discuss the question what on earth the Forms contributechwr(133) For they cause neither movement nor any changechwr(133)” Peirce is one of the few modern thinkers to take cognizance of theories of the type we are discussing. He writes (in a paragraph cancelled by Langley but restored by Wiener): “Another philosophy which had some currency in England in Hume’s time was the theory of a `plastic nature,’ that is to say, a slightly intelligent agent, intermediate between God and the universe, God’s factotum, which attended to the ordinary routine of administration of the universe. This theory was so much out of date that I should not have mentioned it were it not that I suspect it aided considerably in bringing into vogue the phrase law of nature’ in England, an expression which the sectaries of the plastic nature might very naturally, and in fact early did employ. One of them, for example, Lord Brooke, in a work published in 1633chwr(133)” C.S. Peirce, ed. P. Wiener, 297. I am indebted to Jim Tiles for the foregoing reference. Peirce has little use for Brooke’s line of thinking, finding its explanatory principles too non-specific (or tautologous!). But since the aim was not directly to explain effects but to mediate between the universal and the particular, the concept remained in use down to the 18th century.
Philo, following Platonic, Stoic, Rabbinic and Scriptural hints and suggestions, is clearly an architect of the approach, for his logos partakes of both of objective and subjective rationality and thus mediates between the absoluteness of God and the finite particularity of the world. Philo, like Maimonides, calls the ideas powers, following Sophist 247DE; he makes them subordinate to God and in effect answers Aristotle’s charge (n. 9 above) by treating the ideas as the active (energoun), organizing principles of nature. See De Mutatione Nominum 21, 122 and De Specialibus Legihus 18, 45–48 and H.A. Wolfson, Philo, 1.217–18; cf. David Winston, citing Phaedo 95E and Diogenes Laertius 7, 147 in Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985), 19.
The identification is not confined to the Guide to the Perplexed. See Maimonides Code, I, Hilkhot Yesodei Torah 2.7, ed. and tr. M. Hyamson (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1974) 36a, where the highest echelon of angels, the scriptural haryot, are called forms ( urot).
Guide II 6, Munk, 2.17b, II, 14–17.
Guide II 6, Munk 2.I7b, II, 5–6. The usage which refers to emanative energies as forces or powers is precedented in Arabic in al-Fârâbi’s F Aql (De Intellectu et Intellecto), ed., M. Bouyges (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1939); tr. A. Hyman, in Arthur Hyman and James Walsh, eds. Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 211–21.
Guide II 5, citing Psalms 19:2–4.
For the complementarity of rationalism and empiricism in this type of account of knowledge and discovery, see my Avicenna (London: Routledge, 1992), chapter 3.
Guide II 4, Munk 2.14ab; II 48, citing Jonah 2:2.
Guide 1I 6, Munk 2.176, II. 1–3; cf. De Generatione Animalium 11 3, 7366 26–737a I1.
Thus 1 Kings 19:11–12: “chwr(133) and the Lord was not in the windchwr(133) the Lord was not in the earthquakechwr(133) the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire was a still small voicechwr(133)” Maimonides cites the passage in Guide II 41 in justifying his account of prophecy, which neither reduces prophetic inspiration to a matter of subjective appearances nor treats it as a matter of divine indwelling but relies upon the (creationist) mediating scheme of (neoplatonic, intellectual/formal) angels between the divine Absoluteness and human intelligence.
Guide II 6, Munk 2.166–17a. The Rabbinic text Maimonides cites echoes Sanhedrin 38b but the verbatim citation is unknown. The celestial retinue are called God’s pamalva (cf. the Latin famulus), servitors or ministrants, not peers. Plato speaks of the creator (i.e. the demiurge) consulting the forms at Timaeus 28b, 29ab, 30c.
See Guide III 18.
De Anima III 4, 429a 15–16, 430a 3, 5, 430a 17–20: Guide 1 68, Munk 1.86b; Code I, Hilkhot Yesodei Torah 2.10.
Guide I 48. Philo reaches a similar conclusion.
Guide III 21.
Guide III 19.
Guide III 19, Munk 3.40.
Guide III 16, Munk 3.43b-44a.
Guide II 6, Munk 2.16–18.
Cf. al-Ghazâlï, Tahâfut al-Falâsifa, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, ed. M. Bouyges (Beirut: Catholic Press, 2nd edn., 1962): “Our second point addresses those who grant that these events flow (or emanate) from the First Principles of temporal events..”
This is what Peirce, perhaps recognizing its Islamic origins, called “explanation à la Turque”; ed. Wiener, 296.
Guide III 17, II 13; cf. III 31.
Guide III 13, I 1; “Eight Chapters” 5, echoing Plato’s Theaetetus 176.
Guide III 32. Cf. Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character,tr. Constantine Zurayk (Beirut: American University, 1968), 81–83 and my discussion in “Humanism and Islamic Ethics: The Curious Case of Miskawayh,” in Brian Carr, ed., Morals and Society in Asian Philosophy, (London: Curzon, 1996), 1–22.
Guide II 20, citing Physics II 4–5; and Guide II 12, 48.
Guide II 3, 10, 12. For God’s “will” and “wisdom,” see my “Matter and Form as Attributes of God in Maimonides’ Philosophy,” in R. Link-Salinger et al., eds., A Straight Path: Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1988), 86–97.
See Guide I 2, II 4.
Guide II 17; cf. III 15.
Guide I 72, II 10.
Maimonides Code I, Hilkhot Teshuvah 5.2, 5.1, 5.4 viii, Hyamson, 86b-87b; cf. my Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classical Age (Edinburgh University Press and Rutgers University Press, 1999), 146–200. For animal vitality see Guide I 72, Munk 1.102b 1. 17–103a I. 1.
Guide II 5, Munk 2.15ab. Maimonides emphasizes the inanimateness of the four elements in Guide I 72 and argues that if the elements were alive and the forces of nature exercised discretion, confining their actions only to what is necessary, there would be no natural evils.
See Guide III 22.
Guide II 6, Munk 2.16b I. 10.
Guide 172, Munk 1.100b.
See Qur’an 2:34 and the commentaries; for Shiite views, M.J. Kister, “Legends in tafsir and hadith Literature: the Creation of Adam and Related Stories,” in Andrew Rippin, ed., Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur än (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 108–9.
Guide II, 11, III 12–14. The spheres, being composed of matter, are “impure” relative to the disembodied intellects; but even the spheres are nobler as bodies than human bodies are: They do not exist for our sake. For the nobility of the spheres and intellects, see Abraham Ibn Daud, The Exalted Faith, ed. and tr. Norbert Samuelson and Gershon Weiss (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1986), 120b.
Guide II 7, Munk 2.18b. Cf. Saadiah, on Job 1:6 in Goodman, tr., The Book of Theodicy, 15459.
Guide II 6, Munk 2.17ab. Note the terminological affinity of Maimonides’ `formative power’ and the `plastic nature’ mentioned by Peirce.
Guide 1I 6, Munk 2.18b.
Guide II, Introduction, Premises 10–12. Natural forms are “forces in a body,” but the substantial forms through which a body exists — soul and mind, for example — are not forces in a body or divided even per accidens with its divisions (cf. Aristotle, De Anima I 5, 41lb 19–27). Maimonides accepts all the premises of the Philosophers, except the eternity of the world, which he treats as an isolable postulate of their system.
See Guide II 4, 5, 7, 8, esp. II 5, citing Psalms 19:4, Munk 2.15b.
Phaedo 97C–98E. Socrates assumed that if he knew how all things are governed for the best and thus what is best for each, he would know how human beings too should be governed. Cf. Maimonides’ understanding of Moses’ desire to learn God’s ways (the laws of nature), so as to know how to govern the people: Guide I 54, glossing Exodus 33:13–20 and 34:6–7.
Metaphysics 1 3, 984a 11–19, 985a 18; cf. De Anima 1 2, 405a 14–17; Poetica 15, 1454b 1.
Metaphysics 14, 985a 5–29.
Cf. al-Fârâbî, Kitâb Mabâdï’ ârâ’ ahlu ‘l-madînatu ‘1-Fâd ila (The Book of the Principles behind the Beliefs of the People of the Outstanding State) III 9, ix. R. Walzer as Al-Fârâbî on the Perfect State, 145–49.
Guide II 4.
Guide II 19, 21.
The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Discussions 3–4, 10; see my “Al-Ghazâlî’s Argument from Creation,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 2 (1971) 67–85, 168 88; “Did al-Ghazâlî Deny Causality?” Studia Islamica 47 (1978) 83–120; RAMBAM, 175–204.
See Metaphysics 1046b, 1048a 8–12, and Maimonides, Guide II 19; “Eight Chapters,” 8; Code,1, Hilkhot Teshuvah 5.2, with 5.1 and 5.4 viii; see my discussion in Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classical Age, pp. 146–200.
Guide III 17.5 and Deuteronomy 11:26.
To affirm an open future is not to affirm the actuality of alternative futures but only the reality of alternative possibilities as possibilities - that is, their virtuality. See my “Leibniz and Futurity,” in Leibniz and Adam, ed. M. Dascal and E. Yakira (Tel Aviv: University Publishing, 1993), 301–324. If we adopt the notion of emergence portended in Bergson’s idea of duration or even in Spinoza’s dynamism with regard to the conatus, we can say that even if only one future will be actual, there are a variety of alternative possibilities for that future, since its nature does not become determinate until it exists, that is, until its causes make it actual.
Cf. “Eight Chapters,” 8, citing Deuteronony 22:8.
If the position sounds Leibnizian, there is good reason: see my “Maimonides and Leibniz,” with Leibniz’ reading notes on the Latin Doctor Perplexorum (Basel, 1629).
I say all but infinitely painstaking care, because had infinite care been taken, the task could not have been completed and finite being could not have emerged. Finitude would have been overwhelmed. Cf. David Novak’s paper in L.E. Goodman, ed. Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 299–318.
TF 197–98.
Guide III 18.
See my God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 240–241.
Guide II 20.
Cf. my discussion of the incoherence of positivism in God of Abraham, 73–78.
Guide III 25.
See Arthur Hyman’s paper in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought (Albany, SUNY Press, 1992), 111–135.
See Guide II 12, citing Jeremiah 2:13, Psalms 36:10; Guide 168. The ideas of light, life, being and truth, come together in the Psalmist’s fused image a fountain of life which is the source of our enlightenment - the image in which Ibn Gabirol saw the affinity of Biblical poetry to Neoplatonie metaphysics. The elaboration of the intuition is the substance of Ibn Gabirol’s metaphysics, as set forth in the papers of Professors Dillon, Mathis and McGinn in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought.
See Guide III 21.
Cf. Guide I 23, 65.
For Plato insisted that all temporal things are mutable, and Maimonides urged that one cannot make a metaphysical canon of the observed stability of kinds in nature. See Guide II 17, 14; cf. Maimonides’ suggestive gloss of Genesis Rabbah XXI at Guide 1 49: “Through this dictum they state clearly that the angels [se. forms] are immaterial and have no fixed bodily form outside the mind.” Munk 1.556 II 2–4. For what is fixed, by Platonic standards must be ideal, and what is mutable must be sensory and so imaginable.
See Aristotle, Physics IV 2; al-Ghazâlî, Ma’ârij al-Quds 203–04; Tahâfut al-Falâsifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers) Bouyges 2nd ed., 67; Guide I 52.
See Guide I 71, Munk 1.96a.
Themistii in Aristotelis Metaphysicorum librum Lambda paraphrasis, Medieval Hebrew translation, ed. S. Landauer, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 5.5 (Berlin, 1903) 8, cited in Herbert Davidson, “Averroes on the Active Intellect,” 202.
See P.S. Schiavella, “Emergent Evolution and Reductionism,” Scientia 108 (1973) 323–330.
Aristotle, Metaphysics Alpha 4, 985a 24.
See Guide III 18, 22; cf. I 68, also I 9, with Saadiah, Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions, II 13 ad fin., ed., Kafih, 115, tr. Rosenblatt, 136.
See her edition, translation and commentary of Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 60, 74, 93–98.
Guide III 13 with Ill 25. But Saadiah does not believe that God made all things for man’s pleasure or entertainment, but so that man can earn salvation and deserve reward and recompense. And he notes, pointedly, that rain falls on the sea, and not just on our fields.
Thus Maimonides’ emphasis on the Aristotelian thesis, still employed by our scientists, that the world forms a single system, and his further emphasis on the Saadianic point that the thesis of the world’s singularity is vital to the central claim of monotheism. See Guide 172.
For Maimonides’ rejection of epicycles and eccentrics, see Guide II 24; cf. I 71, Munk 1.96a; cf. F.J. Carmody, “The Planetary Theory of Ibn Rushd,” Osiris 10 (1952) 556–86; A.I. Sabra, “The Andalusian Revolt against Ptolemaic Astronomy,” in E. Mendelsohn, ed., Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1984) 133–53; Tzvi Langermann, “The True Perplexity of The Guide of the Perplexed: Part II, Chapter 24,” in Joel Kraemer, ed., Perspectives on Maimonides: Philosophical and Historical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 159–74.
Guide II 3.
Guide II 11. Plato’s likely story account of science is not, of course, a skeptical rejection of the scientific enterprise, but an attempt to explain the nature and limits of what must pass for knowledge within the confines of a temporal, sensory world. See Anne Ashbaugh, Plato’s Theory of Explanation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). Maimonides too is no radical skeptic. He accepts Saadiah’s epistemology, and his most distinctive principle of method is the postulate that the possibility of doubt is not sufficient grounds for rejecting a claim.
Guide, II 2, 11. At II 8 Maimonides cites a passage now lost in Talmud texts, at Pesahim 94b, “The sages of the nations prevailed,” to show that the Rabbis conceded the authority of secular science in astronomy and other natural sciences.
Guide I 72, II 4-5. Averroes gives the same diffident approval of cosmic emanation that we find in Maimonides, bracketing such speculations as the work of “recent philosophers such as alFârâbî,” perhaps along with the ideas of Themistius and Plato, yet calling them “the most solid” notions we have to go on in these rather unsolid areas. Madrid Escorial Hebrew manuscript G1-14, fol. 103b, etc. cited in Davidson, “Averroes on the Active Intellect,” n. 40. Al-Fârâbi himself characteristically brackets metaphysical views which have an impact on cosmology as “beliefs of the people of the excellent state.” See Ara’, and Fusid al-Madani.
See God of Abraham, Chapter 8.
See my “Ordinary and Extraordinary Language in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy.”
See the chapter on creativity in my Truth (forthcoming).
See De Partibus Animalium I 5, esp. 645a 9.
Cf. De Partibus Animalium I 1, 640b 30 ff.
Here I refer to the profound insight articulated in Cynthia Ozick’s story, “The Laughter of Akiva,” in its original recension in the New Yorker 56 (November 10, 1980, et seq.), 50–60+.
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Goodman, L.E. (2000). Maimonidean Naturalism. In: Cohen, R.S., Levine, H. (eds) Maimonides and the Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 211. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2128-8_5
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