Abstract
In a chapter of his Autobiography devoted to the ideas and persona of Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon addresses Mendelssohn’s famous claim that Judaism possesses “revealed laws” but “no revealed doctrinal opinions.” Maimon expresses initial agreement with Mendelssohn, claiming that he shared with his one-time mentor on the Berlin Enlightenment scene of the late eighteenth-century the view that “Jewish religious laws” amount to “the foundational laws of a theocratic constitution.” But if Judaism is a theocracy, if “the foundational laws of the Jewish religion are at once the foundational laws of their state,” then it follows, Maimon proceeds to argue, that continued obedience to Jewish religious law is a condition for membership in the Jewish collective. As a result, Maimon claims he cannot understand why Mendelssohn himself rejected the right of rabbinic authorities in their time to punish with excommunication those who transgress the laws of Torah. The theocratic character of Judaism grants Jewish religious authorities the right and power to enforce Jewish law among all Jews. How then could Mendelssohn argue that “the Church has no right in civil matters,” while “nevertheless claiming the enduring existence of the Jewish-religious state”? At the same time, Maimon wondered, what if a Jew is ready to renounce membership in the Jewish theocratic community? What if a Jew “no longer wants to be a member of this theocratic state, and goes over to a pagan or a philosophical religion that is nothing more than the pure natural religion? And if he, merely as a member of a civil state, subjects himself to its laws and again demands his rights from the same?” In a case where a Jew quits the Jewish people, commits himself religiously to a philosophical religion and politically to a civil state, Maimon simply cannot believe “that Mendelssohn would still claim that this Jew is duty-bound in his conscience to follow the laws of the religion of his fathers only because they are the laws of the religion of his fathers.”
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- 1.
Salomon Maimon, “Maimons Lebensgeschichte,” ed. by K.P Moritz, in Gesammelte Werke Vol. I, ed. by V. Vetta (Hidesheim: Olms, 1965), pp. 484–87 [henceforth, Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte]. Where possible, I have drawn upon the partial translation of J. Clark Murray: Salomon Maimon, An Autobiography (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois, 2001).
- 2.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 538.
- 3.
Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 158.
- 4.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 150–52.
- 5.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 152.
- 6.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 155.
- 7.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 155.
- 8.
In Givat HaMoreh [The Hill of the Guide], Maimon’s commentary on the first part of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, Maimon claims that Judaism is the only religion that has the potential to be such a “true” religion, but that one’s understanding and practice of Judaism must be guided by such interpreters as Maimonides in order for it to reach its potential: “For all religion other than our Torah is in truth opposed to the intellect. … But in the case of one who belongs to the religion of truth, he will need the Rav’s [i.e., Maimonides’] comment to distinguish between the true intention of the Torah and the intention of the Torah as it appears to us according to the way in which ‘Torah speaks in the language of men,’” Givat Hamoreh, eds., S.H. Bergmann and N. Rotenstreich (Jerusalem: The Israeli Academy of Sciences, 1965), p. 25.
- 9.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 157–58.
- 10.
Cf. G. Freudenthal, “Die philosophischen Systeme der Theologie nach Salomon Maimon,” in Religious Apologetics – Philosophical Argumentation, eds., Y. Schwarz and V. Krech, (Mohr/Siebeck, 2004), p. 95: “The use of the imagination draws after itself the analogy between effect and cause: since however the world features phenomena that are very different and even opposed to one another, so there must also be ascribed to the first cause opposing attributes. Opposed attributes are such that indeed – as positive predicates – don’t contradict one another, but do indeed contradict each other in an object, i.e., exclude each other. … An object, to which such attributes are attributed at once, is thus determined contradictorily. This counts for the first cause, as well.”
- 11.
In contrast, Gideon Freudenthal reads this passage as suggesting Maimon views original Judaism as positing God as immediate cause of worldly phenomena, in line with Spinoza. See his “Die philosophischen Systeme der Theologie nach Salomon Maimon,” p. 98: “A system, which doesn’t employ the imagination and thus doesn’t grasp the cause through analogy to its effects, but concludes immediately from the phenomena to the first cause, is, for example, a ‘true’ religion. As example of such a true religion, Maimon once mentions the ancient Judaism at the time of the patriarchs.” Although I argue that Maimon more commonly attributes to original Judaism a view of God as regulative idea, I will also indicate passages that suggest otherwise.
- 12.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B436, in Kants Werke: Akademie Textausgabe III (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), p. 283. Translated into English by P. Guyer and A. Wood as Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 461.
- 13.
In his Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004), p. 49 [GW II, 80], Maimon defines an “idea of reason” as “the formal completeness of a concept.”
- 14.
In his “Jewish Philosophy after Kant: The Legacy of Salomon Maimon,” Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, eds., P. Gordon and M. Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 55, Paul Franks notes that “Kant himself recognizes an affinity between the Jewish prohibition on representing God and his own insistence on the sublimity of the ideas, which entails a prohibition on the methodological naturalization of reason.” Franks’ essay offers a helpful introduction to understanding why the Kantian notion of an idea would be appealing to modern Jewish philosophers, and to Maimon in particular.
- 15.
S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, oder Beleuchtung der Wichtigsten Gegenstande der Philosophie in Alphabetischer Ordnung, in S. Maimon, Gesammelte Werke III, ed., V. Verra (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), p. 99.
- 16.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 248.
- 17.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 249.
- 18.
Maimon thereby identifies the vocation of Judaism with the systematic task of philosophy. Noting Maimon’s comments on Bacon’s New Organon, to the effect that “to philosophize means to bring unity into the manifold of our knowledge. Every science must, as such, philosophize over its object” (GW IV, 357), G. Freudenthal writes: “To lead back the many phenomena to relatively few laws of nature, is thus to establish unity, and is the task of science. And to lead back the plurality of laws of nature into a system with few principles, whose unity is grounded in the first cause, is also just to establish unity, and is the task of philosophy, i.e., metaphysics,” “Die philosophischen Systeme der Theologie nach Salomon Maimon,” p. 101.
- 19.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 254–55.
- 20.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 244–45.
- 21.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 245–46.
- 22.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 246–47.
- 23.
S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, p. 6.
- 24.
S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, pp. 99–100.
- 25.
S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, p. 217.
- 26.
Compare Maimon’s earlier affirmation of Maimonides’ claim that human wisdom is the purpose of creation, in his introduction to Hesheq Shlomo [The Desire of Salomon], a Kabbalistic/philosophical text he composed most likely in 1777–78. Commenting on Maimonides’ statement that “the purpose of the creation of all that is in the world of generation and corruption is nothing but a man who is perfect in wisdom and in action,” Maimon comments: “and behold these words are agreed on by all philosophers, i.e., that the purpose of man is that his intellect develop from potential to actual, and that he grasp all that is in his power to grasp. And this is truth,” cited from the version of the “Introduction” to Hesheq Shlomo, which G. Freudenthal transcribed and edited, and appended to his “The Development of Salomon Maimon from Kabbalah to Philosophical Rationalism,” Tarbiz 80, 1 (2012): 156. Compare also Maimon’s remarks on human perfection in the opening pages of Givat Hamoreh, pp. 1–2.
- 27.
When all is said and done, it isn’t clear whether Maimon has in mind here a practical task beyond that of the active pursuit of knowledge itself. Even when he later engages in more detailed fashion with Kant’s practical philosophy and, for example, reformulates Kant’s moral law in terms of the universal-validity of the rational will (deduced from the universal-validity reason seeks out in the knowledge of truth), Maimon suggests that the highest good towards which the universally-valid will aims is none other than knowledge of truth. See S. Maimon, “Versuch einer neuen Darstellung des Moralprinzips und Dedukzion seiner Realität,” Berlinische Monatsschrift, XXIV (1794): 402–453 [GW VI: 275–324], especially 450–52. Additionally, although Maimon suggests in a few places that the core of Judaism is moral, it isn’t clear exactly what moral teachings he has in mind (beyond the vague call to perfection we’ve seen), or which moral aims (i.e., aims other than the pursuit of truth) the observance of the commandments should direct Jews towards.
- 28.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 158.
- 29.
Perhaps this is why Maimon says so very little about the actual administrative workings of this original Jewish theocracy: i.e., because he grasps theocracy as precisely the absence of (or transcendence of) human politics. Compare “Introduction” to Hesheq Shlomo, pp. 155–56. Here Maimon quotes Maimonides’ comments about human perfection in his introduction to the Mishnah: “his purpose is one action alone and for it he was created; and the rest of his actions are for his sustenance so that he will complete this action. And this action is to conceive in one’s soul the intelligible secrets … which knowledge gives. It is vain and a lie that the purpose of man is to eat and to drink and to have intercourse, or to build a wall” – here Maimon adds “or to be king”… “And the most honored of the intelligibles: to conceive in one’s soul the unity of God and what accompanies this regarding divinity. For the rest of wisdom has no other purpose than to accustom one to it until he arrives at knowledge of God.” Maimon’s addition of the highest political achievement – kingship – to Maimonides’ list of vain pursuits that people mistakenly aims for instead of wisdom, suggests likewise that communal life governed by a religion of reason may indeed free the community from the vanities of human politics. See also “Versuch einer neuen Darstellung des Moralprinzips und Dedukzion seiner Realität,” p. 445, where Maimon suggests that one who ensures that her will is determined in universally-valid fashion, i.e., that what she wills cannot be against the will of any other rational being, “is a member of a perfect republic.”
- 30.
S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, pp. 40–41 [GW II: 65]. See Freudenthal’s explanation of the parallel formulation from Givat HaMoreh: “Only under the Maimonidean and Leibnizian assumption that the human intellect is an image (tzelem) of the divine intellect can it be maintained that the relations we come to know are not merely subjective but objective, the very forms God thinks, and by which he created the world,” “The Philosophical Mysticism of Maimonides and Maimon,” Maimonides and his Heritage, eds., I.Dobbs-Weinstein, L. Goodman, J.A. Grady (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), p. 139.
- 31.
Cf., P. Franks, “Jewish Philosophy after Kant,” p. 63: “Between the human or finite mind and the divine or infinite mind, there is an identity-in-difference. … What appears as matter from our ordinary, finite perspective is revealed as form from an infinite perspective that we can also occupy in mathematics.”
- 32.
S. Maimon, Givat HaMoreh, p. 34. Compare P. Franks’ precise discussion of Maimon’s account of distinctions at Givat HaMoreh, p. 107 in All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005), pp. 53–61. See too Maimon’s famous comparison of mathematical construction to divine thought: “God, as an infinite power of representation from all eternity, thinks himself as all possible essences, that is, he thinks himself as restricted in every possible way. He does not think as we do, i.e., discursively; rather, his thoughts are at one and same time presentations – complete exhibitions. If someone objects that we have no concept of such a style of thinking, my answer is: We do in fact have a concept of it, since we partly have this style in our possession. All mathematical concepts are thought by us and at the same time exhibited as real objects through construction a priori. Thus, we are in this respect similar to God” [GW IV: 20], cited in D.R Lachterman, “Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition and the Infinite Intellect: Reflections on Maimon and Maimonides,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, 4 (1992): pp. 498–99.
- 33.
S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, p. 40 [GW II: 64]. As Franks and Freudenthal have argued, Maimon also views Kabbalah as articulating a position consistent with the Leibnizian-Wolffian view that “God thinks Himself as limited in every possible way.” For an account of Maimon’s Spinozistic tendencies, and for an argument that Maimon is closer to Spinoza (as Maimon understood him) than to Leibniz, see Y. Melamed, “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42, 1 (2004): 67–96.
- 34.
S. Maimon, Givat HaMoreh, 104–06. For two valuable accounts of Maimon’s appropriation of the Maimonidean-Aristotelian “threefold unity of the intellect,” see G. Freudenthal, “The Philosophical Mysticism of Maimonides and Maimon,” and especially “Salomon Maimon’s Development from Kabbalah to Philosophical Rationalism,” the last of which presents the threefold unity of the intellect as the thread that spans Maimon’s intellectual and religious development. Abraham Socher has likewise called this notion “the master concept of Maimon’s thought,” The Radical Enlightenment of Salomon Maimon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 10.
- 35.
S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, p. 116 [GW II: 206–08].
- 36.
S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, p. 237 [GW II: 244].
- 37.
Compare Lachterman’s discussion of the regulative and constitutive aspects of Maimon’s idea of God in “Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition, and the Infinite Intellect,” pp. 497–522, for example, p. 515: “And yet, Maimon’s disagreement with Kant over the nature and classification of ideas may alert us to the possibility that while retaining lexically Kant’s ‘regulative/constitutive’ distinction, he nevertheless gives his ‘sublime idea’ a constitutive, nonhypothetical, function, one bound up with the schematic relation between finite and infinite intellect. What is ‘regulative’ may turn out to be ‘constitutive.’”
- 38.
S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, pp. 237–38 [GW II: 444]. See also, Givat HaMoreh, p. 40, and “Introduction” to Hesheq Shlomo in G. Freudenthal, “Salomon Maimon’s Decelopment from Kabbalah to Philosophical Rationalism,” p. 161, fn. 33. After quoting this rabbinic statement in Givat HaMoreh, Maimon adds: “if it were the case that we are truly finite, it would be impossible that we ever arrive at Its perfection – and understand this!” (p. 40).
- 39.
S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, pp. 126–27 [GW II: 227]. Again, compare Lachterman, “Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition, and the Infinite Intellect,” p. 517: “The mathematical imagination, labile as it is, on the move between formal understanding and sensuous intuition, testifies to its divine origin by trafficking in that antinomy, that polarity.”
- 40.
See e.g., S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, pp. 44–45, 105. On Maimon’s skepticism, see, for example, P. Franks, “What Should Kantians Learn from Maimon’s Skepticism?” in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic, ed., G. Freudenthal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), pp. 200–32 and All or Nothing, pp. 176–90.
- 41.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 411.
- 42.
Compare B. Spinoza on prophecy in Theological-Political Treatise, Complete Works, tr. S. Shirley, ed., M. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), pp. 394–415. In his “Die philosophischen Systeme der Theologie nach Salomon Maimon,” p. 98, G. Freudenthal claims that Maimon understands ancient Judaism as positing God as immediate cause of the phenomena of experience. He thus interprets the passage which I read above as attributing a regulative idea of God to ancient Judaism as instead attributing a Spinozistic position to ancient Judaism. See footnote 11 above, and footnote 44 below.
- 43.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 306–07.
- 44.
There is an important exception to what I’ve presented as Maimon’s attitude towards the span of Jewish accounts of the divine – God as idea being proper to original Judaism, and God as immediate cause as being faulty. In his discussion of religious mysteries in the Autobiography, Maimon suggests that the true meaning of the divine name, YHWH, is “pure existence,” and he claims that the Biblical passage in which this divine name is revealed to Moses “means nothing other than that the Jewish religion sets as its ground the unity of God as the immediate cause of all existence,” Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 252. Freudenthal does not cite this passage in his “Die philosophischen Systeme der Theologie nach Salomon Maimon,” but it supports his claim there that Maimon identifies the “true religion” of Judaism with Spinozism.
- 45.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 246.
- 46.
S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, p. 101.
- 47.
As one might gather from Maimon’s initial division of religions into polytheistic religions grounded in the imagination and the true religion grounded in reason, the span of possible religious attitudes within Judaism is likewise rooted for Maimon in what he sees as the fragile balance between reason and imagination within the human mind. Maimon thus suggests religious fanaticism (“Schwärmerei”) is rooted in “the drive of the productive imagination to determine objects which the understanding shows are undetermined,” “Ueber die Schwärmerei,” Gnothi sauton, oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte, X/2 (1793), in GW VI, p. 613. See also Maimon’s account of the intellect and imagination in his comment on Maimonides’ interpretation of the story of the Tree of Knowledge in Givat HaMoreh, pp. 39–41, and the account of the understanding and the imagination Maimon offers after recounting his own childhood questions about God in Lebensgeschichte, pp. 28–29.
- 48.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 159.
- 49.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 159.
- 50.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 165.
- 51.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 159–60.
- 52.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 160.
- 53.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 65.
- 54.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 124–25.
- 55.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 164–65.
- 56.
S. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 233.
- 57.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 248–49.
- 58.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 213.
- 59.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 213–14.
- 60.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 538.
- 61.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 168.
- 62.
S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, 237 [GW II: 444].
- 63.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 176.
- 64.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, pp. 172–73.
- 65.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 130.
- 66.
Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, p. 306–07.
- 67.
Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, II: 30, tr. by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 348–50.
- 68.
S. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 486.
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Pollock, B. (2017). Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True Religion and Despotism. In: Speight, C., Zank, M. (eds) Politics, Religion and Political Theology. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1082-2_9
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