Chapter 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True Religion and Despotism

Transcription

1 Chapter 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True Religion and Despotism Benjamin Pollock 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 onetime 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 B. Pollock (*) The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Benjamin.pollock@mail.huji.ac.il Springer Science+Business Media B.V C. Allen Speight, M. Zank (eds.), Politics, Religion and Political Theology, Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life 6, DOI / _9 125

2 126 B. Pollock 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. 1 There is little doubt that Maimon had himself in mind when he wondered out loud regarding the fate of the Jew who decided to leave the Jewish theocratic community in a quest for philosophical enlightenment. Given his conviction that Judaism was a theocracy, Maimon may have viewed rabbinic authority as the centerpiece of Jewish communal life. But he also felt keenly that this theocratic structure was an impediment to enlightenment. Maimon despaired over bringing enlightenment to the Jews of eastern Europe, for example, because he believed Jewish religious leaders would view such enlightenment as undermining their authority and power, indeed as threatening the very existence of the Jewish people: I knew too well rabbinic despotism, which has secured its throne in Poland through the power of superstition already for many hundreds of years, and which sought to hinder for its own security the spread of light and truth in all possible ways. I knew how precisely Jewish theocracy is tied up with its national existence, so that the doing-away of the former must draw after it necessarily the negation of the latter. I thus saw that my efforts would be fruitless. 2 Maimon suggests that the rabbinic elite of the Jewish people attained and maintained their power and authority through the promotion of superstition among the Jewish masses. For these leaders of Judaism, the advance towards enlightenment entailed a threat to the very theocratic system that had kept Judaism intact through the ages. And Maimon appears to concede that Judaism in his day had become so dependent on the beliefs and practices enforced by the rabbinic authorities, that it would be impossible to do away with the theocratic structure of Judaism without doing away with Judaism altogether. Enlightenment hardly seemed possible in such a political and religious context. Things did not have to turn out so badly. In fact, although Maimon hardly minces words in his critique of traditional Judaism throughout the Autobiography, he likewise makes it clear that he does not think traditional Judaism had to develop into its current theocratic form. Indeed, earlier in the Autobiography, Maimon had suggested that prior to the development of traditional Judaism there had been an original form of Judaism indeed, an original form of Jewish theocracy wholly committed to the very enlightenment which traditional Judaism resisted with all its might. According to the spirit of its founder, Maimon claims, the theocratic form of governance of the [Jewish] nation is appropriate which rests on the principle that only the true religion resting on knowledge of reason can agree both with civil and private interests. 3 1 Salomon Maimon, Maimons Lebensgeschichte, ed. by K.P Moritz, in Gesammelte Werke Vol. I, ed. by V. Vetta (Hidesheim: Olms, 1965), pp [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 Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 158.

3 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True 127 In sharp contrast to his denigration of Jewish theocracy as diametrically opposed to enlightenment, here Maimon suggests that original Judaism was constituted as a very different kind of theocracy, one in which religious life based on reason made possible not only enlightenment, but the highest aims of political life, i.e., individual and collective felicity. In its original form, Maimon implies, Jewish theocracy holds the capacity to be an ideal religio-philosophical community. The aim of this paper is to spell out the conception of Jewish theocracy that Maimon attributes to original Judaism. I will try to pinpoint how Maimon understands original Judaism to have made possible a communal religious life guided by reason, and what exactly such a life entails. I will propose that what is theocratic about this ideal Jewish polity is the fact that life within it is governed by the idea of God. After exploring Maimon s conception of original Jewish theocracy, I will then explain how, in Maimon s view, Judaism ceased to embody its early ideal. I will trace Maimon s account of Judaism s transformation into the despotic, superstitionbound form of theocracy that Maimon believed hindered enlightenment, and from which he thus sought to free himself. I will conclude by returning to the question of Maimon s own membership within theocratic Judaism. * I want to begin by clarifying Maimon s view of religion in general, and by highlighting a few distinctions he makes between different kinds of religion that will help us make sense of his account of Judaism. According to Maimon, religion may be understood as a natural human emotive response to the experience of forces, phenomena, and events which impact our well-being, but whose causes are unknown to us. The principle of sufficient reason leads human beings to respond to such phenomena by assigning causes to them, and we do so in one of two ways: either we imagine these phenomena as caused by forces which share qualities manifest in the phenomena themselves, i.e., we imagine the causes as analogous in some ways to that which they are supposed to explain, or we reason our way to a cause for these unexplained phenomena without drawing any conclusions from the phenomena themselves about the nature of what causes them. 4 According to Maimon, these two kinds of responses to the experience of the unknown yield two different kinds of religion. The tendency to employ the imagination in order to attribute qualities of the phenomena we experience to their unknown causes is the source of polytheism wherein the diverse kinds of unexplained worldly phenomena are attributed to an equally diverse collection of gods. True religion, on the other hand, results from our recognition through reason that we may not assume that the causes of phenomena we seek to explain share qualities found in the phenomena themselves. To explain all such unknowns, therefore, true religion posits simply the concept of cause itself, and rather than a myriad causes corresponding to the myriad unexplained phenomena, it recognizes one needs to assume only a single completely unknown subject as the cause of all these effects. 5 We will return shortly to address 4 Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, pp Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, p. 152.

4 128 B. Pollock Maimon s claim that true religion arrives at a single unknown first cause by positing the concept of cause itself. According to Maimon, natural religious responses to the unknown cause(s) of phenomena that affect our well-being become positive religion when they develop into clear, concrete, and communicable accounts of the nature of things and their relation to a first cause. Positive religion has as its purpose merely the recounting and precise determination of knowledge, i.e., teaching in view of the first cause, and this knowledge is communicated with another, according to the measure of his capacity, as one has attained it himself. 6 For reasons we will address in what follows, however, positive religion does not always fulfill its purpose. In some instances, positive religion can be used for political ends, in which case only those aspects of religious knowledge that serve political stability and civil felicity are shared with citizens. Maimon designates such cases of the manipulation of religious doctrine for political ends as political religion. 7 Given Maimon s distinctions between true religion and paganism, and between positive and political religions, what kind of religion is Judaism? According to Maimon, original Judaism was the very model of true religion, 8 for instead of celebrating a pantheon of conceivable gods, original Judaism directed itself to, and organized its world-view around a single unknown God as the ground of all that is: Already in its earliest origins, the Jewish religion, as natural Religion, as the nomadic Patriarchs had it, is distinguished from the pagan, in that in it, instead of the many conceivable gods of paganism, the unity of an inconceivable God lies at its ground. Because since the particular causes of effects (which in general occasion a religion) are in themselves unknown and one does not consider oneself justified in carrying over the attributes of the particular effects to the causes and characterizing these through those, so there remains only the concept of cause itself, which must be related to all effects without distinction. This cause cannot once be determined through the effects analogically. Because the effects are opposed to one another and sublate each other in one and the same object in reciprocal ways; if one thus attributes them all to one and the same cause, so this can not be determined through the same analogically. 9 Maimon here suggests that Judaism has its origins in a rational response on the part of the patriarchs to the experience of effects on their well-being whose causes they did not understand. Instead of responding to such experience through imagination, and determining or objectifying these unknown causes through the analogy of 6 Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, p Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, p 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 Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, pp

5 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True 129 their experienced effects, the patriarchs used reason to arrive at the concept of cause itself and, refraining from any unjustified determination of this cause, posited the unity of an inconceivable God as the ground of these effects. Since the effects we experience whose causes we do not understand are diverse and, at times, in tension with each other, moreover, Maimon suggests that the patriarchs could not understand the causality of the first cause as in any way comparable to the onedimensional causes of experience. 10 I wish to argue that when Maimon suggests that the patriarchs grasped God as inconceivable according to the analogy of worldly causes and effects; when he points to the unity of God as first cause despite the vast diversity of the unknown worldly effects this God is said to be responsible for; and when he claims the patriarchs arrived at their God through the positing of the concept of cause itself, Maimon is implying that the patriarchs grasped their God as idea. 11 Kant had understood ideas to play a crucial but somewhat thorny role within human reason. Ideas such as God, the soul, or the world-whole are not objects of experience, according to Kant, but they serve to bring a unity to our experience without which we could not attain coherent knowledge, and they direct us to extend our empirical knowledge towards completion as far as we possible can. We arrive at ideas, Kant claims, by applying a principle of reason to the effects we experience: if the conditioned is given, then the whole sum of conditions, and hence the absolutely unconditioned, is also given, through which alone the conditioned was possible. 12 By way of example, let s say that I subsume two events that I perceive as succeeding one another in time (Y and Z) under the category of causation, in order to judge that Y caused Z. Since the principle of sufficient reason tells me that every event has a cause, however, I will not have explained event Z until I have explained the cause of Y, as well, and so on. Reason tells me then that if I encounter a conditioned like Z, I must presume a complete series of causes or conditions. To put it in the terms that Maimon 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 Translated into English by P. Guyer and A. Wood as Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 461.

6 130 B. Pollock uses, the very concept of cause itself presses for completeness in a complete series of causes, and this completeness is provided by an unconditioned first cause. 13 At the same time as reason presses for completeness, however, this does not change the fact that we do not meet the unconditioned first cause anywhere in experience (for by the principle of sufficient reason, any cause in experience will itself have a cause). Thus, in Maimon s terms, God cannot be conceived by analogy to the objects of experience. It is precisely this fraught quality of being necessary for reason but at once transcending the bounds of empirical objectivity that is captured in Kant s notion of idea. 14 Maimon explains this special character of the first cause, and our relationship to it, in his entry on Religion in his Philosophical Dictionary: [The principle of sufficient reason] forces us to think no object as given without another preceding it as already given, as well. We can thus never encounter in nature, i.e., in the series of objects following each other according to this rule, the first cause, i.e., an object that follows no other, to which however an object of nature necessarily follows, and to this another, etc ; because this is against the assumed rule. By virtue of the nature of our reason, we are thus forced to think this series never as complete, i.e., to seek this first cause. That which is thus sought, is indeed no determined object (in that an object can be determinately thought only in nature through this rule), but rather a necessary idea, without which nature itself cannot happen. 15 Maimon notes here that we never encounter the first cause in nature, and yet nature itself cannot happen without the assumption of the first cause. Since we do not meet the first cause in experience, we cannot claim to know it as a determined object, but rather it serves as a necessary idea. And Maimon suggests that the proper comportment to such a necessary idea is captured in the act of seeking. As necessary idea, the first cause is the ultimate endpoint towards which we direct our sights in seeking to grasp the causes of things. Since however this first cause, as idea, always stands beyond the network of myriad causes we discover within experience itself, in practice it serves a regulative function, directing us to unify and to complete our quest for knowledge of empirical causes as far as we possibly can. Maimon in fact asserts that the notion of the inconceivable God was supposed to serve just this regulative role within original Judaism: Already in its origin, Judaism was attentive to a system or to the unity between the natural causes, and thereby maintained in the end this purely formal unity. This unity is only of 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.

7 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True 131 regulative use (towards the complete systematic connections of all natural appearances) and assumes knowledge of the multiplicity of the different causes of nature. 16 According to Maimon, Judaism in its earliest form was thus not simply a cult of the single unknown God, but rather was, from the beginning, engaged in drawing the systematic consequences of the rational positing of that unknown God, through which the unity between the natural causes could be attained. Precisely as an idea of regulative use, the single unknown God imposes formal unity upon the multiplicity of natural causes in experience without thereby canceling their multiplicity. And by positing the single unknown God as a regulative idea, Maimon suggests, Judaism directs its constituents towards the complete systematic connections of all natural appearances. It is thus important to stress that in designating original Judaism as a true religion, Maimon has in mind not only early Judaism s general preoccupation with the one God, but specifically the way in which this God is grasped as standing in relation to the whole of nature, bringing unity thereby to the manifold phenomena of nature. Maimon makes this point especially clear when he designates the original intention of Judaism as unifying with the knowledge of religion the knowledge of nature, and subordinating the latter to the former, solely as the material to the formal. 17 If, as we ve seen, the knowledge true religion brings is knowledge of a unifying, regulative idea and not knowledge of objects of experience then Judaism s original calling was to grasp the myriad objects of nature collectively in systematic form, as subordinated to and united by the idea of God. 18 Thus far we have traced Maimon s emphasis on the theoretical focus of original Judaism. There are practical consequences, however, to the rational positing of God as regulative idea. According to Maimon, both Moses and the prophets who followed him sought constantly to inculcate that the purpose of the religion is not the outer ceremonies, but rather the knowledge of the true God as the only inconceivable cause of all things and the exercise of virtue according to the prescription of reason. 19 In different writings, Maimon formulates what he has in mind by the exercise of virtue according to the prescription of reason in different ways, and as one finds in his theoretical work, these formulations suggest Maimon adopts a Kantian position that is undergirded by a perfectionism drawing on both Maimonides and the Leibnizian-Wolffian school. Maimon indicates that he views Jewish life to 16 Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, p Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, p 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 Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, p

8 132 B. Pollock be governed by God as regulative idea not only theoretically, but also practically, when he offers a philosophical explanation of the notion of covenant in his Autobiography. Maimon precedes this philosophical explanation with a discussion of the common conception of covenant that appears central to Judaism. According to this common conception, religion is a pact attained between man and another moral being of a higher kind. It assumes a natural relationship between human being and this higher moral being, so that through the reciprocal fulfilling of this pact they reciprocally forward their interests. 20 When the duties each party to the covenant must fulfill for the other are formalized, Maimon explains, a positive or revealed religion comes into being out of its natural roots. Such, Maimon claims, is what we appear to find in early Judaism: The true religion, both natural and revealed, which as already previously noted Judaism amounts to, consists in a first silent, but afterwards agreed-upon contract between certain people and the highest being, which appeared to the patriarchs themselves in person (in dream and prophetic appearances) and made known his will, and the reward for following and the punishment for not following, upon which then with two-sided agreement a contract was drawn. Consequently, he had the same renewed with the Israelites in Egypt through his representative Moses and the reciprocal duty to one another determined in detail; which afterwards, was confirmed formally on Mt. Sinai by both sides. 21 Judaism thus appears to be rooted in a covenant, first natural and subsequently positive or revealed, according to which God and the Jewish people agree to fulfill their reciprocal duties to one another. Such a covenant appears to have been forged first between God and the patriarchs, and then to have been renewed at Sinai with the entirety of the Jewish people through Moses. But Maimon now suggests that this common conception of covenant is in fact intended to point to a practical orientation according to the regulative idea of reason: To the thinking reader I need not say that this representation of the pact between God and man is to be taken analogically. The most perfect being of all can reveal itself only as idea of reason. What revealed itself to the Patriarchs and prophets in an image [bildlich] anthropomorphically, according to their capacity of grasping, was not the most perfect being of all itself, but rather a representative of the same (his sensible image). The contract, which the most perfect being of all closes with man does not have the reciprocal satisfaction of needs as its purpose, because the highest being has no needs and the needs of man will not be satisfied through this contract, but rather only through viewing the relationships between themselves and other objects of nature grounded in the laws of nature. This pact can thus be grounded in no other way than in the nature of reason, without view of a purpose. 22 I want to set aside temporarily Maimon s insinuation that the founders of Judaism did not themselves fully grasp the rational content of their own doctrine a point that would appear to undermine his claim that Judaism was rational at its origin. I will address this issue towards the end of this article. Here I want to clarify Maimon s philosophical explanation for the notion of covenant. Rationally understood, 20 Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, pp Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, p Maimon s Lebensgeschichte, pp

9 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True 133 Maimon argues, the most perfect being of all cannot be grasped as an object, nor can this highest being be understood as having needs which would stand to be fulfilled through covenant. The depicted revelation of God must be conceived as the revelation of the idea of reason. Maimon suggests that we should understand the covenant as a representation of the relationship between human beings and this rational idea of God. There are a few points to highlight in Maimon s explanation of covenant here. First of all, notice that the idea of God towards which the notion of covenant points is not the idea of the first cause, but rather the idea of the most perfect being of all. To suggest that this most perfect of all beings is an idea is, once again, to suggest that the most perfect being is not to be met with anywhere in experience, but that it serves instead a regulative function: the idea of divine perfection orients our own quest for limited, human perfection by giving us a glimpse of what complete perfection might look like, just as the idea of a first cause orients our quest to know the empirical causes of things by giving us a glimpse of what a complete cause might look like. Maimon says as much in his entry on Idolatry in his Philosophical Dictionary: God is the idea of the concept of the most perfect being of all. It is formed through the taking-together of all thinkable perfections and their elevation into the infinite. This idea is the highest model, which man sets up for himself, according to his vocation, for imitation in the striving after perfection, and which he can ever approach, without being in the position to achieve it completely. To set up another limited model for imitation is idolatry. 23 Maimon here suggests that what it means to imitate God is to elevate the idea of the most perfect being as model in one s own quest for self-perfection. And Maimon again highlights the way that God as idea illuminates a task whose fulfillment one can only ever approach into infinity. But despite the fact that one will never attain such an infinite goal, holding up the proper idea of perfection to orient oneself in one s practical quest matters. Indeed, according to Maimon, to fail to do so is nothing short of idolatry. Maimon s account of covenant thus suggests that original Judaism included a positing of the idea of divine perfection as a practical model for one s quest for perfection. But Maimon offers a few further vague clues regarding how he conceives of the practical path to perfection determined through covenant. Maimon writes that human needs cannot be satisfied through a contract with a divine being but rather only through viewing the relationships between themselves and other objects of nature grounded in the laws of nature ; and he claims that the covenant properly understood is grounded in no other way than in the nature of reason, without view of a purpose. Rather than directing human beings to take as their model a divine other-worldly form of perfection, these formulations suggest to the contrary that human needs and human purpose are to be determined precisely through one s relationship to all other objects in the whole of nature. What orients the human being s practical path, accordingly, is no particular purpose but simply 23 S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, p. 6.

10 134 B. Pollock what we ve come to understand as the unifying, systematic task of reason as a whole. The pact between human beings and God, Maimon would have Judaism teach, commands of Jews that they orient themselves according to the systematic whole of nature unified by the regulative idea of God, that the self-perfection which they seek stands in harmony with or somehow contributes to this systematic unity. Let me present one last source in which Maimon suggests that the human pursuit of perfection modeled as we ve seen on the idea of God as most perfect of all beings can be grasped as harmonizing with, or even determined out of one s knowledge of the systematic whole of nature. In his entry on Religion in the Philosophical Dictionary, Maimon gives an account of both the theoretical and the practical sides of the religion that is necessary and universally-valid for every rational being, insofar as it posits a divine first cause [as] a necessary idea. In view of the theoretical use of knowledge, Maimon asserts, echoing his claims in the Autobiography about the regulative function of the idea of the unknown God in original Judaism, this religion commands the expansion of the use of the understanding into the infinite, so that one seeks for each thing its cause, for this again its cause, etc But to this theoretical aspect of the true religion, Maimon now adds a practical aspect: In view of the practical use which rests on the preceding: In virtue of its underlying idea (of a highest cause, which is determined in no other way than through the highest purpose in its effect), this religion commands us not only to seek the means to some hypotheticallyassumed purpose in general, but rather [to seek the means] to the highest purpose, which is determined through the highest knowledge of things and their relationships to one another. Even if we can never attain this completely, so we can still approach this into the infinite. But the highest purpose for man is his highest felicity; but reason knows this as necessarily wrapped up with man s highest perfection. Consequently, this religion commands us to strive after the highest perfection. 24 In addition to orienting the systematic pursuit of knowledge, Maimon asserts here, the positing of God as a regulative idea has practical consequences. The highest knowledge of things and their relationships to one another, unified by the idea of a highest cause, should now allow us to determine the highest purpose of that highest cause of the natural realm. To the idea of a single unifying source of the whole of nature there should correspond a single purpose towards which that whole of nature is directed, and we should be able then to infer from this highest purpose of the whole of nature the moral purpose we should strive to achieve. In a later dictionary entry on Purpose, Maimon claims that the purpose of nature determined a priori, can be (according to the assumption of an infinite perfect being as cause outside the world, or the world itself as such a being) nothing other than the greatest possible perfection (the best world). 25 And in Maimon s remarks here on Religion, he asserts that human purpose consists in the highest felicity that is wrapped up with the highest perfection. 26 Maimon suggests, finally, that one s comportment to the 24 S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, pp S. Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch, p 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/philo-

11 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True 135 highest purpose should again be that of seeking: we approach it into the infinite. Just as the idea of the first cause should orient our seeking out of the myriad empirical causes of nature and unite them systematically, so the highest purpose of that first cause should orient our seeking of the myriad means at our disposal for directing ourselves towards that end, namely, the highest perfection of the world, and our own perfection and felicity within it. 27 Let me summarize what our investigation has taught us regarding Maimon s intent in designating Judaism as true religion. As a true religion, Judaism directs the sights of its constituents towards the idea of God as first cause of the whole of nature, and this idea is intended to unify and orient their quest to understand the systematic causal structure of the natural world. Furthermore, the idea of God directs the practical pursuits of those committed to true religion. Whether the idea of God is thought in terms of the most perfect of all beings, or whether the idea of God as first cause of nature is thought as implying a highest purpose of nature, this idea directs human beings to seek their perfection within the context of the perfection of nature as a systematic whole. Now that we have a general sense of Maimon s views of the theoretical and practical aspects of Judaism as a true religion, let us return to Maimon s designation of original Judaism as a theocracy. Maimon claims that according to the spirit of its founder, the theocratic form of governance of the [Jewish] nation is appropriate which rests on the principle that only the true religion resting on knowledge of reason can agree both with civil and private interests. 28 Maimon s depiction of early Jewish politics as theocratic is noteworthy, first of all, because it appears to represent an exception to the category of political religion to which Maimon introduced us earlier. Recall Maimon s designation as political sophical text he composed most likely in 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 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): [GW VI: ], especially 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.

12 136 B. Pollock religion those cases in which positive religion is inculcated within a community not in order to promote knowledge but rather as a means of persuading members of a community, deceitfully if necessary, that it is in their personal interest to pursue the collective good of the community. As a theocracy, Judaism indeed makes use of religion in order to advance political goals. But Maimon claims that the theocracy of original Judaism fulfills the collective interests of the community without needing to deceive individuals about their respective personal interests. Both collective and individual interests are fulfilled through the inculcation of the true religion resting on knowledge of reason. The implication seems to be that this ideal form of theocracy, as divine rule, is free of the manipulation, deceit, and coercion that typify human politics. 29 Having explored Maimon s understanding of true religion, moreover, we can say something about the kind of life Maimon envisions original Jews as pursuing within their theocracy. Living according to the true religion of reason would entail the pursuit of systematic knowledge of the natural world, oriented by the regulative idea of God as the single, unknown ultimate cause. And it would entail the pursuit of rational moral aims conceived by Maimon at times in perfectionist terms as those which serve the higher purpose of the perfection of the world, in the context of which the particular perfection, and consequent felicity of the individual is sought. In other words, the fulfillment of individual and civil interests which Maimon suggests the true religion makes possible in the Jewish theocracy may be understood as following from proper orientation according to the idea of God. What does it mean to designate such a communal life based upon reason as theocratic? God may be said to rule in such a context, we can say, insofar as God is the regulative idea according to which we both pursue systematic knowledge and determine our practical aspirations. To be governed by God is thus, first of all, to be governed by the idea of God. But there is more to say about what Maimon may be getting at in his designation of original Judaism as theocratic. Here is the place to note that Maimon often 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 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.

13 9 Theocracy and the Idea of God: Salomon Maimon on Judaism Between True 137 suggests that the relationship between human beings and the divine is not exhausted in the regulative terms we have highlighted almost exclusively thus far. In his critique of Kant s account of synthetic knowledge, Maimon famously argued that if knowledge was indeed produced in the way Kant claimed it was i.e., out of the application of the laws of the understanding to a material manifold intuited in a spatio-temporal framework then that manifold would likewise have to be produced by the understanding, and could not be given to us from without, as Kant asserted. Such a demand could only be met, Maimon argued, if we were to conceive of our understanding as a limited form of an infinite understanding which produces its own objects: We assume (at least as idea) an infinite understanding which produces out of itself all possible kinds of relations and relationships of things (of ideas). Our understanding is just the same, only in a limited way. 30 It may appear to us that the material manifold we intuit in experience comes from the world outside our understanding; but, Maimon claims, this is due to the limited degree of our understanding, and not to the essence of our understanding itself. 31 Maimon indeed asserts that the human finite intellect is essentially identical to the infinite intellect, and differs from the infinite intellect only by degree, in his comment on Maimonides interpretation of the Biblical assertion that God made man in the image of God : The infinite intellect can conceive of any intellect that is actually outside it by conceiving of itself in a limited way; and so a limited intellect can conceive of the reality of the infinite intellect through conceiving of itself through the negation of the limit. But since quantity isn t part of the definition of the essence [etzem], behold the essence of the infinite intellect and the finite intellect will be one in his eye, and won t be distinguished except by degree S. Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, pp [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 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 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

14 138 B. Pollock At times, Maimon uses the language of the Leibnizian-Wolffian school to articulate the kind of identity our intellect shares with the infinite intellect, as when he suggests that sensibility and understanding be grasped not as separate faculties, as Kant would have it, but rather as the selfsame source of knowledge, whose difference consists only in degrees of the perfection of this knowledge. 33 At times, Maimon draws on the Maimonidean-Aristotelian image of the divine unity of intellecting subject, act of intellection, and intellected object, and suggests that human beings have the potential to tap into such divine unity both when they grasp the universal inherent in particular objects, and in what Maimon claims is the prior act of synthesis through which we construct the objects of experience. 34 Maimon s claim that Kant s account of experience can best be understood as a description, from our finite, limited perspective, of an act of knowing in which we approach identity with the infinite intellect, has a direct impact upon the notion of God as an idea. In his Essay on Transcendental-Philosophy, Maimon suggests that the three Kantian ideas we met earlier God, soul, and world-whole are in fact reducible to the single idea of the infinite intellect: We have here (if the expression be permitted me) a trinity: God, the World, and the human soul, namely if we understand under World merely the intellectual world, i.e., the sum [Inbegriff] of all possible objects, which can be produced through all possible relationships thought by an understanding, and under Soul, an understanding, (capacity of thinking) which relates itself thereto, so that all these possible relationships can be thought by it, under God however an understanding, which thinks all these relationships actually, (because otherwise I don t know what I should think under Ens realissimum), so these three are one and the same thing. But if one understands under the world only the world of senses, as something that can be thought by our capacity of intuition, intuited according to its laws, and according to the laws of thinking (although through a progression into infinity); under soul, on the other hand, this capacity insofar as it is determined through actual intuiting; under God, however, an infinite understanding which relates itself actually to everything possible through thinking, so they are indeed three different things. Since however this way of representing comes not from our absolute capacity for knowledge, but rather only from its limitation, so this one is not true, but rather the first way of representing is true. Here is thus the point in which materialist, Idealist, Leibnizian, Spinozist, indeed even Theist and Atheist (if these gentlemen only understood themselves, and didn t incite the mob out of evil against each other) can unite themselves. Indeed it is only a focus imaginarius! How 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): S. Maimon, Givat HaMoreh, 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.