Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon 087820301X, 9780878203017

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Apiqoros The Last Essays of

SalomOn Maimon Timothy Sean Quinn

“Apiqoros” THE LAST ESSAYS OF SALOMON MAIMON

“APIQOROS” The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon

Timothy Sean Quinn

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE PRESS

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE PRESS © 2021 Hebrew Union College Press Cover design by Elena Barschazki Set in Arno Pro by Elena Barschazki Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Quinn, Timothy Sean, author, translator. | Maimon, Salomon, 1754-1800, author. Title: “Apiqoros”: the last essays of Salomon Maimon / Timothy Sean Quinn.

Description: Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An introduction to the work and life of the 18th c. philosopher Salomon Maimon, followed by translations (the first into English) of Maimon’s final essays”-Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020047821 | ISBN 9780878203017 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780878201921 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Maimon, Salomon, 1754-1800. | Philosophy. Classification: LCC B3068 .Q56 2021 | DDC 181/.06--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047821

This book is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend and colleague

Robert Aaron Rethy (1949–2008) ‫השיבנו ונשובה‬

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................................................ix ABBREVIATIONS....................................................................................xi PART I INTRODUCTION: “WE ARE ALL EPICUREANS”..................1 Maimon’s Life and Works.....................................................................1 The Last Essays: Commentary.......................................................... 21 Maimon’s Legacy................................................................................. 49 PART II: THE LAST ESSAYS Notes on the Translation................................................................................59 “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality”................................................ 63 “The Great Personage”.............................................................................. 75 “Explanation of a Well-Known Anthropological Phenomenon”........ 93 “The Moral Skeptic”................................................................................... 99 “Letters to Herr Peina”............................................................................ 113

POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS “Sophistic of the Human Heart”.............................................................. 123 “Origin of Moral Good and Evil”............................................................. 129 “The Origin of Human Folly”................................................................... 131 “On the Emotions in General”................................................................. 137

APPENDIX “On Salomon Maimon and his Final Hours”......................................... 141

BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................... 145 INDEX..................................................................................................... 151

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank, first of all, my colleague Professor Gabe Gottlieb for goading me years ago into attempting a translation of Maimon. Together with Professor James T. Clarke of the University of York, UK, they encouraged further study and efforts of translation; the present volume is the fruit of their generous encouragement. I wish also to thank Mr. Matthew Blain, my student assistant, for his editorial suggestions and for the kind ear he offered as I worked out issues with the interpretive essay. I am indebted as well to Professors David H. Aaron and Jordan Finkin for their assistance helping me to understand and to translate a talmudic allusion of Maimon’s. I note as well Professor Aaron’s and Professor Jason Kalman’s support of this project since its inception Finally, I wish to express the debt of gratitude I owe to my dear friend and editor, Sonja Rethy, for the care she brought to the preparation of this manuscript. Her incisive intelligence, her learning, and her generous expenditure of time have made this book far better than it ever could have been without her criticism and advice. Portions of the Introduction first appeared in an earlier essay, “Salomon Maimon’s Attempt at a New Presentation of the Principle of Morality and a New Deduction of its Reality”  (British Journal for the History of Philosophy  27:1 [2018]: 155–82), and in “Maimonides and Kant in the Ethical Thought of Salomon Maimon,” forthcoming in Practical Philosophy Between Kant and Hegel, ed. James Clarke and Gabe Gottlieb (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2021). ix

Abbreviations

AA

[Akademie Ausgabe] Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Reimer, 1900–.

Attempt

Maimon, Salomon. Translated by Timothy S. Quinn. “Salomon Maimon’s  ‘Attempt at a New Presentation of the Principle of Morality and a New Deduction of its Reality’” (Attempt)  British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27:1 (2018): 155–82.

BM

Berlinische Monatsschrift (cited by volume and page)

ETP

Maimon, Salomon. Essay On Transcendental Philosophy. Translated by Nick Midgley, Henry Somers-Hall, Alistair Welchman and Merten Reglitz. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2010.

GW

Maimon, Salomon. Gesammelte Werke, 8 volumes. Edited by Valerio Verra. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965–1976 (cited by volume and page).

Groundwork

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

KU

Maimon, Salomon. Kritische Untersuchungen (Critical Investigations), GW VII. xi

PART I

INTRODUCTION: “WE ARE ALL EPICUREANS” Y_Z Maimon’s Life and Works

When Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon’s erstwhile patron, scolded him for his dissolute and aimless life, Maimon countered: “We are all Epicureans.”1 Maimon’s riposte harbors a complex nesting of judgments and accusations, concerning himself and concerning the cultural situation in which this studied apiqoros found himself at the close of the eighteenth century. In the first place, the remark is a verdict on philosophical morality. As Maimon explains: “Moralists can give us merely the rules of prudence, or of using the appropriate means to achieve a given end. But they cannot prescribe the ends themselves.” 2 There is, then, no firm basis for Mendelssohn’s judgment against Maimon. But Maimon’s explanation is also an instance of rhetorical sleight of hand, at one and the same time a self-effacing admission of his own hedonism and an accusation against Mendelssohn and his circle: in spite of their cultural refinement and moral probity, they were all, in the last analysis, Epicureans. However, as an accusation, “Epicurean” has another, deeper resonance for thinkers of the Haskalah. 1. Salomon Maimon, Autobiography, trans. Paul Reitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 13:208; Gesammelte Werke (GW), Valerio Verra, ed. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965–1976), vol. I, 1–588. 2. Autobiography, 209. 1

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To be apiqoros, Epicurean, is to be a heretic. Mendelssohn and his circle, on the other hand, had striven to draw together German Enlightenment with Jewish thought, to make Jewish thought — and hence Jews — acceptable to Europeans, while still maintaining their Jewishness. Maimon, however, proved to be unacceptable to them, owing to his combination of heretical opinion — he was an open supporter of Spinoza — with crude shtetl manners. In the judgment of Marcus Herz, a friend of Kant’s who was to be both a friend and antagonist of Maimon, Maimon was at first impression a redendes Tier — a “talking animal,” entertaining but less than human.3 Confronted by the condescension of the enlightened berlinischer Haskalah, Maimon’s riposte stings both culturally and philosophically. We may note that the chapter of Maimon’s Autobiography in which this story arises is titled: “My Initial Aversion to Belles Lettres.” But Maimon also found himself equally on the margins of the traditional Judaism of his youth, which he judged in its worst instances to foster superstition and fanatical prejudices. Two events from his life illustrate this story. In the first, during his initial visit to Berlin, Maimon arrives at the Rosenthaler Gate bearing a copy of More Nevukhim, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, along with an original commentary that he intended to publish. Revealing himself to a rabbi “who had gotten a sense of [his] ideas and plans,” Maimon was forbidden entrance into the Jewish quarter. He comments: Orthodox Jews regard [the study of science] as dangerous, potentially harmful to both religion and good morals. They were convinced that I was especially at risk, being one of those Polish rabbis who, rescued by a happy accident from the slavery of superstition and perceiving the light of reason, have suddenly cast off their chains. Yet, Maimon explains, these rabbis have a point: This is a well-founded fear…Such rabbis are like people who have long been starving and then happen upon a table decked out with 3. We may note the persistence of this judgment in Heinrich Graetz’s characterization of Maimon: “He rose from the thickest cloud of Polish ignorance to pure philosophical knowledge, attaining this height by his unaided efforts, but owing to his skepticism, he fell prey to shocking errors.” See Graetz, History of the Jews, trans. Bella Lowry and Phillip Bloch, vol. 5 (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1956), 407.

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good things to eat. They will greedily dig in and gorge themselves until they are overstuffed. Maimon and others of his ilk were, so to speak, intellectual Epicureans, gorging on the edge of heresy.4 In a second instance, while working in Posen as a rabbi after his rejection in Berlin, Maimon was encouraged by some young talmudists to offer lectures on Maimonides’ Guide. But he was prevented by their parents, who feared that the study of philosophy might corrupt these young scholars by encouraging independent thinking.5 Somewhat later, these same residents of Posen, fearing that anyone touching a certain stag’s horn above the door to the Jewish community house would surely die, were alarmed when Maimon mocked them, touched the horn…and lived! At this point, Maimon writes, “their fear was transformed into hatred,” an observation that intensified his resolve to return to Berlin “and wipe out whatever was left of my own superstition through enlightenment.” It is telling that Maimonides figures preeminently in both these stories. Maimonides was Maimon’s exemplary Aufklärer — his source of genuine (although not modern) enlightenment, as Maimon’s own act of self-naming attests; the study of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed led Maimon out from the cave of religion to the light of true philosophy.6 At the same time, Maimonides was a controversial figure within Jewish thought, suspect to the orthodox rabbinical community. And while early maskilim celebrated Maimonides as a champion of their own brand of rationalism and toleration, Maimon nonetheless notes a whiff of condescension in their praise.7 For example, in the teasing introduction to 4. Autobiography, 111–12. 5. Autobiography, 117. 6. It was during his time at the Gymnasium Christianeum in Altona, in 1784 or 1785, that he took the last name “Maimon.” Abraham Socher comments on the oddness of this act of self-naming, done in response to “the great symbolic and administrative demands of European emancipation”: “Rather than formalizing his patronymic…or place of origin…Shelomo ben Joshua chose to name himself after the outstanding intellectual figure of the Middle Ages. Something of the boldness of this choice…can be seen if one simply imagines a contemporary lapsed Catholic…renaming himself Aquinas.” See The Radical Enlightenment of Salomon Maimon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 36. 7. See Jay Harris, “The Image of Maimonides in Nineteenth-Century Historiography,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 54 (1987):

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his first published work, “Probe Rabbinischer Philosophie” (“A Sample of Rabbinic Philosophy”), Maimon needles the Haskalah on the issue of Maimonides, the subject of the essay.8 The essay intends, Maimon states, to extend Mendelssohn’s plan to offer “some thoughts, translations of moral propositions, and anecdotes,” in an effort to demonstrate the continued relevance of Jewish thought. But Mendelssohn’s project, unlike, in Maimon’s view, his own, was to remain but a popularization, an attempt to promote “our enlightenment by spreading useful knowledge,” after the fashion of Johann Jakob Engel’s recent Philosoph für die Welt (Philosopher for the World).9 It is rabbinic wisdom, perhaps, but not rabbinic philosophy. To make matters more problematic, Maimon admits that the approach his essay takes — using Kant to clarify Maimonides — will most likely be disturbing to contemporary readers, “as if I wished in doing so to diminish the deserving fame of our great contemporaries, in trying to show that someone in the twelfth century had already thought as they do.”10 At the outset of his first essay, in short, Maimon makes clear that he intends to please neither traditional Jewish readers nor readers committed to Enlightenment thought. Maimon is thus twice the apiqoros, at home neither in the world of the Haskalah he wished so desperately to enter, nor in traditional Judaism. Indeed, as his Autobiography describes in delightful and, at times, heart-rending detail, Maimon’s life was continually unsettled, an unending struggle to make a whole out of his disparate and ofttimes competing parts. His outré status in fact led Hannah Arendt to identify Maimon as a paradigmatic Jewish pariah, abandoning (and, in his view, abandoned by) his religion, while simultaneously resisting assimilation to German culture and to the Haskalah.11 He was, in the words of Gideon Freudenthal, “a 117–39; also, James Lehman, “Maimonides, Mendelssohn, and the Me’asfim,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 20 (1975): 87–108. 8. First published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift (BM), vol. 14 (1789), 171–79 (GW I: 589–97). 9. Johann Jakob Engel (1741–1802), Philosoph für die Welt (Berlin: Mylius’sche Buchhandlung, 1845). The work, an attempt to popularize Enlightenment thought, contains dialogues, essays, and stories on subjects of general interest, e.g., morals and manners, literature, death, religion and superstition. See Christoph Böhr, Philosophie für die Welt: Die Popularphilosophie der deutschen Spätaufklarung in Zeitalter Kants (Stuttgart: Frommen-Holzboog, 2003). 10. BM, vol. 14:172; GW I: 590. 11. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Jewish Social Studies

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philosopher between two cultures.”12 The details of Maimon’s life, familiar from his Autobiography, bear out this view of Maimon as restless outsider. Born Shelomo ben Joshua in 1753 in Zukowy Borek (Sukowiborg) in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, he began studying Torah and Talmud under the tutelage, first, of his father, and later from an assortment of other instructors. The young Maimon proved himself a prodigy. At eleven, in an effort to help his family out of poverty, he was betrothed; by fourteen he was a father, supporting his young family by teaching Talmud. At twenty-five, Maimon, already chafing under the moral strictures of religious orthodoxy (and of his mother-in-law), learned of the new Hasidic movement, which he deemed “enlightened.” He therewith journeyed to the court of the Maggid of Mezricht. His verdict on Hasidic teachings, as he reports them in his Autobiography, was mixed. On the moral plane, he approved the embrace of sensuality and freedom from ascetical extremes. On the intellectual plane, he found himself drawn to the Maggid’s “accurate ideas of religion and morality,” in particular, teachings concerning perfection: They maintained that man achieves his highest perfection only by regarding himself as an organ of God, rather than as a being that exists and acts for itself. The former, they felt, was man’s vocation. Thus, the proper course of action was not to spend their entire lives apart from the world, trying to suppress their natural feelings and kill off their vital powers. Instead, they should develop their natural feelings as much as possible, use their strengths, and constantly try to extend their influence. In many ways, the moral resonance of this passage sounds across the ambit of Maimon’s life: we catch an echo of it in his assertion, a decade or so later, that “we are all Epicureans”; and even later, in his correction of Kant’s and Reinhold’s notions of moral incentives. To the most enlightened members of the new sect, Maimon in fact ascribes “a refined Epicureanism.”13 Hasidism had a more immediate effect of persuading Maimon of a monistic union of divine and human intellects 6 (1944): 100. 12. Gideon Freudenthal, “A Philosopher Between Two Cultures,” in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic, ed. Gideon Freudenthal (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 1–17. 13. Autobiography, 99.

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“Apiqoros”: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon

— “acosmism” — a view that would dispose him, first, to the writings of Spinoza and Leibniz, and later, become ingredient in his critique of Kant. Over time, however, Maimon became disenchanted with the “new sect”: however accurate their “ideas of religion and morality,” they remained prone “to all kinds of excess” owing to their tendency “to follow vague feeling rather than precise knowledge.”14 At the same time, he tired of what he saw as the Hasidic elite’s manipulations of their followers: “the smart ones have focused on the art of controlling free men.”15 Having become convinced of the need for profound immersion in science as an antidote to religious schwärmerei or fanaticism, Maimon began to study physics, optics, and medicine. By 1777 he decides to travel to Berlin to further his scientific studies, supporting himself in fits and starts as an itinerant rabbi and physician. After a picaresque journey — making his way as a tutor, sleeping in the hold of a ship on his way to Stettin, showing up nearly naked, ill and starving in Posen — when Maimon finally arrives in Berlin at the Rosenthaler Gate he is promptly, as noted, barred from entry into the Jewish quarter, out of fear of what damage a new commentary on the Guide might do to pious Jews. Maimon then departs Berlin for Posen, where he remains for two years before returning to Berlin. (It is in Posen that the second incident involving Maimonides occurs.) When he finally arrives in Berlin a second time, he successfully joins the circle of Moses Mendelssohn and Marcus Herz. Through them, his philosophical education begins in earnest, as he is introduced to the works of Spinoza, Wolff, and Leibniz, among others. But after Mendelssohn’s criticism of his questionable manner of life — he was reputed at the time to be a heavy drinker and to frequent houses of ill repute — Maimon again departs Berlin, first, for Hamburg, and then for the Gymnasium Christianeum in Altona. While in Hamburg, in an effort to improve his material circumstances, and to find an intellectual home for himself somewhere, Maimon attempts a conversion to Christianity.16 The Protestant pastor to whom 14. Autobiography, 87. 15. Autobiography, 98. 16. This strange event requires some elucidation. In his Autobiography, Maimon reports that after arriving in Hamburg in “straightened circumstances,” and unwilling to return to Poland, he would have to find a way to remain at his studies. “But,” he continues, “with my insufficient mastery of the local language, customs, and way of life…I certainly couldn’t count on being able to make my way in Germany.” Without a profession, and unable to “speak a single one of the languages in

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Maimon makes his confession of faith, however, rebuffs him, stating: “You are too much of a philosopher to become a Christian.” Arriving soon after in Altona, Maimon pursues formal studies in the natural sciences and in German (his German remained deeply inflected with Yiddish, in cadence and in grammar). It is here that he adopts the surname “Maimon,” in honor of the great philosopher. Two years later, in 1781, Maimon returns to Berlin, but soon, encouraged by a few friends and patrons, he moves to Dessau to work on a project promoting enlightenment through the translation of scientific works into Hebrew for the benefit of Polish Jews. After only a brief period, however, Maimon moves yet again, this time to Breslau, where his long-suffering wife, accompanied by their eldest son, David, issues an ultimatum: come home, or grant a divorce. Maimon eventually chooses the latter. What follows is the most fruitful period of Maimon’s life, the catalyst for which would be his rigorous study of Kantian philosophy. Maimon composes a series of critical commentaries on Kant’s works: Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790), Philosophical Dictionary (1791), The Hill of the Guide (1791), Autobiography (1792), On the Progress of Philosophy (1792), Disputations in the Field of Philosophy (1793), Fundamental Principles of Newtonian Philosophy (1793), Inquiry into a New Logic and Theory of Thought (1794). In addition, he completes translations with commentary on Francis Bacon’s New Organon and Aristotle’s Categories. In 1795, Maimon finds his final patron, Count Adolf von Kalckreuth, on whose estate in Silesia Maimon lived while composing his Critical Investigations Concerning the Human Intellect (1797), along with a series of shorter essays (the subject of this present volume): “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality” (1798), “The Great Personage” (1799), “Letters to Herr Peina” (1799), “The Moral Skeptic” (1800), as well as a series of posthumous writings: “Sophistic of the Human Heart,” “Origin of Moral Good and Evil,” “The Origin of Human Folly,” and “On the Emotions in General.” In 1800 Maimon dies, having spent his Silesian years struggling with chronic alcoholism. The Protestant pastor and Maimon’s friend, J. C. Tscheggey, who would later compose a memoir of Maimon’s final weeks, records that when he urged Maimon on his deathbed to accept the soul’s immortality, Maimon replied: “But how does it help us?” which I might have made myself comprehensible to others,” Maimon concluded: “my only option was to take on the Christian faith” (Autobiography, 215).

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Tscheggey responds: “…it helps to bring peace.” Maimon’s final answer: “I am at peace.” He dies on 22 November. As befitting a life-long apiqoros, Maimon was buried in a section of the Jewish cemetery in Glogau reserved for philosophers and heretics, “gegen dem Schießhaus.” Local children, following custom, stoned his casket. Soon, Count Kalckreuth would purchase a memorial stone for Maimon’s grave. It could perhaps be tempting to neglect the works of Maimon’s final years based upon their brevity or occasionally their quality. This would, of course, be a profound mistake, since these essays, especially “The Great Personage” and “The Moral Skeptic,” draw a provocative close to Maimon’s ofttimes agonistic relationship with Kantian philosophy. To appreciate the relevance of his final essays, it is useful to consider the main lines of his philosophical development. Maimon’s earliest work, still unpublished, was a handwritten manuscript titled Hesheq Shelomo, “Salomon’s Desire,” composed during his time in Posen.17 It consists of five separate treatises: “Ma‘ase Nissim,” a commentary on the medieval talmudist Nissim of Geronda; “Eved Avraham,” a supercommentary on Avraham ibn Ezra’s commentary on Torah and Psalms; “Ma‘ase Livnat ha-Sapir,” his essay on Maimonides and Kabbalah; “Ma‘ase Hoshev,” an algebra textbook; and “Avarchecha Bahya,” an exposition of Bahya ibn Paquda’s biblical commentary. This work is a useful index of Maimon’s early orientation, both conceptually and stylistically — an orientation that would, in fact, remain central to his thought throughout his career. We note, to begin, that his intellectual polestar is two-fold: Torah and mathematics. Further, a cursory look at the Jewish scholars on whom he comments — Nissim of Geronda, Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and Bahya ibn Paquda — show Maimon’s inclination toward thinkers who rejected mystical interpretations of Torah in favor of rational explanation. Maimonides and Ibn Ezra are especially noteworthy: Maimonides was a “radical Aristotelian” of the school of al-Farabi and Averroes, while Ibn Ezra was crucial for Spinoza’s later denial of the Mosaic authorship of Torah. Nissim of Geronda followed Nachmanides, another radical Aristotelian, while Ibn Paquda was one of the first Jewish thinkers to attempt to weave together an accord between reason and revelation. All were rationalists of a sort, a fact 17. Hesheq Shelomo (Posen, 1778). National and University Library, Jerusalem (MS 806426).

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implicit in Maimon’s choice of title.18 As Abraham Socher points out, the Hebrew word hesheq derives from the Arabic ishk, a term used by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Maimonides, and other Arabic and Jewish Aristotelians of the Middle Ages to specify a distinctly philosophical eros. This eros culminates in intellectual perfection. Intellectual perfection, in turn, requires parti­ cipation in divine intellect. Although Maimon would exchange the term divine intellect for “infinite intellect,” his convictions about the teleology of philosophical eros, convictions he shared with his medieval forebears, remained throughout his career. They in part inform Maimon’s eventual rejection of the Kantian “primacy of the practical.” Stylistically, with the exception of the essay on algebra, the essays in Hesheq Shelomo all take the form of commentary or supercommentary. Commentary on significant or canonical writings is a traditional Jewish way of interpretation and analysis, as well as of teaching: Maimonides’ Guide, for example, was often printed with accompanying commentaries (to which, of course, Maimon planned to add his own). It comes as no surprise, then, that commentary is, as Gideon Freudenthal puts it, “Maimon’s first and natural choice of medium for philosophical work.”19 Commentary is, however, unsystematic in presentation. It is somewhat ironic, then, that Maimon should approach that most systematic of philosophers, Immanuel Kant, through a most unsystematic mode of writing. Yet, as Freudenthal again points out, Maimon saw no conflict between the systematic philosophy with which he was engaged and the less formalistic mode of commentary.20 As he admits in his Autobiography, Maimon developed a “quite unusual” method for studying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: After reading it through once, I had a mere obscure idea of each section. I then tried to sharpen my understanding through my own reflections in order to work my way to the author’s meaning. This is actually what one calls thinking oneself into a system of thought.21 This technique, acquired from his early talmudic studies, allowed Maimon “to create a kind of coalition system” that took the form of “observations 18. Nissim of Geronda (1310–1376); Avraham ibn Ezra (1089–1167); Moses Maimonides (1135?–1204); Bahya ibn Paquda (first half 11th century). 19. Gideon Freudenthal, “Maimon’s Philosophical Itinerary,” Afterward to The Autobiography of Salomon Maimon, 246. 20. See Maimon’s letter to Reinhold, GW IV: 241. 21. Autobiography, 230.

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and commentary” on Kant’s first Critique, while involving the entire scope of his reading: Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, but also Talmud and Kabbalah. The result was Maimon’s first published work, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790).22 It represents perhaps the first thoroughgoing attempt to assimilate modern German philosophy both to the content and to the style of pre-modern Jewish thought. In a letter to Reinhold, Maimon’s life-long antagonist, Maimon clarifies: We have chosen different philosophical methods. For your system, necessity and absolute universal validity are of paramount importance… For me, truth is the most important even if it is demonstrated in a way that is less systematic, absolutely necessary, and universally valid. Maimon’s inclination away from systematicity is reflected in his preference for physics over the transcendental philosophy of his age. The former, which proceeds from knowledge of particulars to theories of increasing generality, leads inexorably to the supposition of “infinite intellect,” indemonstrable, but the inevitable condition (as Maimon seeks to demonstrate) for the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever. The latter, transcendental philosophy, focusing on the faculty of a priori cognition, “can only be used to deduce what is already known.”23 Maimon favored the former approach, as he indicates in a letter to Fichte of 1794: “you wish to travel from top to bottom (from the concept of a science as such to the concrete sciences), but I want to travel from bottom to top.” 24 This journey would require a significant departure from the strictures of the Kantian system. In Maimon’s words, “my transcendental philosophy takes up the problem that Kant’s Critique tries to solve — namely, quid juris? — but in a much broader sense than in Kant’s works.” 25 We might summarize this problem, which would inform all of Maimon’s thought, both theoretical and practical, as follows: for Maimon the signal problem of Kantian philosophy is justifying the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. Maimon calls into question both the possibility and even the 22. From his comments on Kant’s Critique we can glean that he studied only the first edition (1781). The second edition was published in 1787; Maimon completed his Essay around 1789, as a letter to Marcus Herz of 7 April 1789 makes clear (AA 11:14–15). 23. GW IV: 263. 24. GW VI: 449–50. 25. Autobiography, 231.

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existence of such judgments.26 The problem of justifying synthetic a priori judgements, in turn, depends upon our ability to justify the application of intellectual categories to the world in a way that yields demonstrable knowledge. In the “top-down” approach Maimon criticizes, these categories, for example, cause and effect, represent basic concepts ordering our experience and intuition, but exist in our minds a priori, independent of either experience or intuition to which they are applied. The issue, as he sees it, is the impossibility of demonstrating, in Kant’s terms, how the a priori forms of understanding can be applied to intuition and sensibility, apart from which synthetic a priori judgments are impossible. By contrast, according to Maimon, “for a cognition to be true, it must be both given and thought at the same time: given with respect to its matter (that must be given in an intuition), and thought with respect to the form that cannot be given in itself.” 27 Kantian philosophy fails to bring together the thought and the given, the matter and the form of cognition, and to that extent fails to answer the twin questions to which the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments gives rise, quid juris and quid facti.28 At bottom, the issue is one of overcoming dualities that Maimon sees at the heart of the Kantian system. At the same time, however, Maimon sees this problem to extend beyond the confines of the Kantian system; the quid juris question speaks to dualities at the heart of philosophy itself: If we want to consider the matter more carefully, we will find that the question quid juris? is of a piece with the important questions that have occupied all previous philosophy, namely the explanation of the community between body and soul, or again, as the explanation of the world’s 26. See Gideon Freudenthal, “Maimon’s Subversion of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: There are no Synthetic A Priori Judgments in Physics,” in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic. Studies in German Idealism, vol 2, ed. Gideon Freudenthal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 144–75; (Berlin: Max Planck Institute, 2001), 1–31. 27. Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (ETP), trans. Nick Midgley, Henry Somers-Hall, Alistair Welchman and Merten Reglitz (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2010), 36. 28. Here, Maimon employs the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter to explain the Kantian distinction between the object of cognition — its “material” component — and the laws the intellect follows to arrive at a cognition — its “formal” element. The form-matter distinction therefore aligns, for Maimon, with the distinction between quid juris and quid facti.

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arising (with respect to matter) from an intelligence.29 The problem of the emergence of the material world, matter arising from mind, concerned Maimon since his early Kabbalah studies. Finding a solution to this problem initially attracted him to the acosmism of the Maggid of Mezricht, and later, to the pantheism of Spinoza, two strikingly anti-dualist philosophies. One year after the publication of the Essay, in his commentary on Maimonides, Give‘at ha-Moreh, Maimon again pursues a solution to this problem, this time from the point of view of a Maimonidean correction of Kant. Commenting on I.68 of the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimon contrasts what he is convinced is an irreconcilable dualism between intellect and sensibility within Kant’s account of knowledge with Maimonides’ account of the unity of intellect (al-‘aql), the act of intellection (ta’aqqul), and the intellected object (al-m’aql) in God. As Maimon explains: …if the intellect existed alone, it would certainly be possible to reach an intellectual apprehension, that is, the representation of the state of the object and all its properties, without ever rendering a cognition, that is, without being able to attribute the same conditions of understanding to a real existing thing. On the other hand, if only sensibility existed, we would be able to reach a sensible perception [wahrnehmen] but not a cognition. It is for this reason that we need them both. Thus, intellect, the subject, and the intelligible object will become one thing in itself from the point of view of the form of cognition, when it in itself is the object of cognition [Objekt der Erkenntnis].30 As Maimon clarifies in his Essay, it is necessary “to assume an infinite mind, at least as an idea, in relation to which all forms are at the same time objects of thought,” since “our human mind is of the same nature 29. ETP, 37. 30. Give‘at ha-Moreh, ed. Samuel Hugo Bergman and Nathan Rotenstreich ( Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1965), 107. See Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.7, 9; On the Soul III.1–5. For a commentary on Maimon’s interpretation of this chapter of the Guide, compare David Lachterman, “Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition and the Infinite Intellect: Reflections on Maimon and Maimonides,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 30, no. 4 (1992): 497–22, and Carlos Fraenkel, “Maimonides and Spinoza as Sources for Maimon’s Solution of the ‘problem quid juris.’ ” Kant-Studien, vol. 100 (2) (June 2009): 212–40.

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as the infinite mind, although in a restricted and limited manner.”31 Maimonides’ account of the unity of divine intellect explains “the true reality of every intellect.” In short, the question, quid juris, requires, in Maimon’s view, the assumption of an infinite intellect producing all possible relations between objects, therefore explaining how concepts can be applied to objects given through the forms of sensibility. We can know the world, in short, because it has already been known, comprehensively, by another. We note in passing how the structure of Maimon’s argument mimics that of Kant’s regarding the practical postulate of God’s existence, except that Maimon transposes it from the plane of religion and morality to that of theoretical philosophy.32 While the details of Maimon’s argument need not detain us, it is important to see the extent to which Maimon forces Kant to the bar of Maimonidean judgment. Solving the various dualisms involved with Kantian transcendental philosophy, Maimon uncovers a more profound and challenging dualism — between traditional philosophy and modernity. Maimon’s confrontation with this dualism is especially evident in his critique of Kantian practical philosophy. Although they occupy considerably less space in his oeuvre than do his critical reflections on matters of Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, Maimon’s critiques of Kantian morality are not correspondingly insignificant, especially given the way he weaves them into his critiques of Kant’s theoretical project. For example, in his Essay, Maimon indicates the need “to remark that the moral good is good only because it is true.”33 Three years later, in his Disputations in the Field of Philosophy, Maimon writes: “justifying a necessary and universally valid morality is surely the most important issue for anyone seeking truth.”34 These statements are particularly telling; as will become evident, they indicate the influence of Maimonides on Maimon’s ethical thought in a manner that mirrors Maimonides’ influence on his theoretical critiques. 31. ETP, 38. 32. In the second Critique and in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant argues that the existence of God is the practical postulate for morality, since moral action implies the existence of an intelligent being who exactly proportions happiness to moral worth. 33. ETP, 409/209. 34. Salomon Maimon, Streiferein im Gebiete der Philosophie (Berlin: Wilhelm Wieweg, 1793); GW IV: 234.

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Explaining the origins of his moral convictions in his Autobiography, Maimon confesses that “my morality was then genuine Stoicism.”35 Stoicism, as it turned out, held a double appeal for Maimon. On the one hand, Stoicism “aimed at the attainment of free will, and at the supremacy of reason over feelings and passions.” The goal of Stoic self-mastery, “knowledge of the truth,” represents the highest human perfection, “the highest determination of man.” On the other hand, Stoic restraint had as its counterpart an Epicurean pursuit of pleasure; as Maimon remarks about the “highest class” of Hasidim in the court of the Maggid, “the strict Stoicism they practice enhances and ennobles their experience of pleasure, something that becomes increasingly dulled among vulgar Epicureans.”36 For Maimon, the highest, most ennobling pleasures are those accompanying the pursuit of truth and the acquisition of knowledge. His Stoicism is, therefore, a provisional Stoicism, preparation for those pleasures that compel and reward “the highest determination of man.” Importantly, it is here that Maimon’s epistemological-metaphysical thought meets his moral thought, a merger mediated neither by a Stoic nor by an Epicurean, but by Maimonides: Everything else about us that we have in common with animals should be set down merely as a means to the highest good in reality. The cognition of the good to me was indistinguishable from cognition of the truth, since I, following Maimonides, held only knowledge of the truth to be the highest good for human beings.37 Morality so conceived is instrumental, “set down merely as a means to the highest good….cognition of truth,” a judgment that is a virtual paraphrase of Maimonides’ account of perfection in the ultimate chapter of the Guide (III.54); Maimon paraphrases this chapter in the ultimate chapter of his own Autobiography. According to Maimonides, the highest species of perfection, which consists in “the acquisition of rational virtues,” is the “ultimate end” of human life: through it, “the human being is a human being.” By comparison, morality is “a preparation for something else and not an end in itself.” As Maimonides states earlier in the Guide (III.27), “to ultimate perfection there do not belong either actions or moral qualities.” 35. Autobiography, 177. 36. Autobiography, 99. 37. Autobiography, 210.

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This strict separation of moral and intellectual virtues or “qualities” reduces morality, for Maimonides, to “commonly held opinion” necessary to support human community; it aims at “cultivating the disposition to be useful to people,” and therefore, unlike intellectual perfection, aims at the good of human community rather than to what is essential to the human as human. Thus, in an early passage from I.34 of the Guide, Maimonides exhorts the young to acquire moral virtue, but only as a means to acquire intellectual virtue: its sole value is to prepare the soul to pursue intellectual perfection.38 Maimon embraces this view, closely paraphrasing these Maimonidean passages in his interpretation of the Guide at the end of his Autobiography. Of particular significance is his endorsement of Maimonides’ view that moral perfection is but the penultimate human perfection, important for establishing human community, but in the end “merely a preparation” (bloß Vorbereitung) for and therefore inferior to the ultimate, intellectual perfection, or “perfection of knowledge” (Vollkommenheit der Erkenntniß). This Maimonidean-inspired goal allows Maimon not merely to subsume the moral under the theoretical or intellectual. It renders the intellectual the end for the sake of which moral virtue is virtue, a view that roughly parallels Maimon’s earlier explanation of the assumption of an infinite intellect as a basis for solving the quid juris question. As he states in his Critical Investigations of 1797: The individual considers himself as an object of nature, consequently, as a limited being, and yet, since his power of cognition extends to all possible objects, he finds himself in the position to strive toward the infinite, and to approach ceaselessly the infinite power of cognition (divinity). Could a greater worth for a being be conceived, than to strive after divinity? And must not all other motives completely vanish in the face of the motives of cognition and morality (whereby those sublime preferences extend to external actions)? Here therefore we have the overwhelming motive for morality, whose…overwhelming power no one who has thought the matter over can doubt.39 38. Maimonides’ subordination of moral to intellectual virtue follows Aristotle; see Nicomachean Ethics X.8. 39. GW VII: 245.

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In a deliberate reversal of Kant, a critique of pure reason no longer serves as propaedeutic for establishing the sovereignty of pure practical reason; rather, practical reason serves as propaedeutic for the perfection of knowledge. In spite of his manifestly Maimonidean commitments, Maimon’s touchstone both for the basic framework and nomenclature in light of which he addressed moral philosophy remained Kant’s. Thus, we find in Maimon familiar Kantian themes: the opposition between duty and inclination, and, with this opposition, the corresponding problem of motives; the emphasis (against Spinoza, to whom he is elsewhere indebted) on freedom of the will; the identification of the categorical imperative as the supreme principal of morality, and the problem of establishing its universal validity. Yet Maimon’s divergences from Kant in matters of morality, as we have already seen, are at least as prolific as his affinities, if not more so. These divergences arise principally in two interrelated ways. First, Maimon rejects, as we have seen, Kant’s subordination of the theoretical to the practical under the influence of Maimonides. Second, and connected to this rejection of the “primacy of the practical,” Maimon revives notions of happiness and perfection Kant had banished from the charmed circle of moral worthiness. For Kant, happiness and morality are famously at odds. While morality must possess universal validity, happiness, as an “empirical principle,” is inseparable from instances of private gratification. Concepts of happiness are thus invariably tainted by self-interest; as Kant puts it in his Foundations, “the principle of happiness…is the most objectionable” of all empirical principles, because it bases moral obedience “on incentives that undermine and destroy all its sublimity.” For an action to possess moral worth, according to Kant, it must be free from any and all inclinations, that is, from any engagement with the pleasures, or determination by ends that appeal to our self-interest — and for Kant, all end-directed activity is tainted by self-interest. Moral worth is henceforth action in obedience to a categorical imperative that commands “as if the motive for our action could become a universal law.” Duty, obedience, and “respect for law” are to silence our passions and inclinations on behalf, not of happiness, but of moral worthiness to be happy. Maimon, by contrast, is led to rehabilitate the place of happiness in moral action by his commitment to Maimonides’ elevation of intellectual perfection to the status of the highest good. Maimon admits, following

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Kant, that happiness has an “empirical” dimension that would appear to disqualify it from the domain of moral motives. However, the degree to which happiness transcends merely empirical satisfactions renders it a “practical law” that resembles the role played by “the principle of causality” in uses of theoretical reason. Maimon further argues that the same pleasure accompanying the drive for intellectual perfection through the cognition of truth also accompanies actions in obedience to the categorical imperative, both “extensively” — that is, it accompanies all moral actions — and “intensively” — that is, it belongs to us by virtue of our human nature. Maimon offers a uniquely playful index of his reshuffling of Kant’s ideas in his recasting of the first sentence of the first part of Kant’s Groundwork. Where Kant famously writes: It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will.40 Maimon amends: It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without qualification except the striving after cognition of truth.41 In so stating, Maimon confesses that he must “take the liberty of departing from this great philosopher” — Kant — in arguing that a “material principle” compels the drive for cognition of truth and intellectual perfection, even though it remains entirely of a different sort than the drive for sensuous pleasure.” 42 Happiness, in short, is the telos of intellectual perfection. 40. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7. 41. To “strive after cognition” is an awkward phrase, but Maimon uses it repeatedly. He does so in part because of the Kantian provenance of the word Erkenntnis. Maimon is deliberately using Kantian terminology in an effort to correct Kantianism, which is why Erkenntnis is here translated as cognition rather than as knowledge. T. S. Quinn, “Salomon Maimon’s ‘Attempt at a New Presentation of the Principle of Morality and a New Deduction of its Reality’” (Attempt) British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27:1 (2018); GW IV: 407–8. 42. Attempt, GW IV: 432.

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A reconsideration of the problem of motives follows suit. In his Philosophical Dictionary of 1791, Maimon asserts his deviation from Kant, writing that what appears to be the fulfillment of a duty may well be caused by an inclination. If so, obedience to duty on purely rational grounds is not the sole motivation to act in accordance with duty.43 Maimon writes: while “no one claims that he is obligated to follow his inclinations,” there is in fact “nothing apart from inclination that can provide a ground for duty other than reason mediated by its necessary form,” a judgment that leads Maimon to reject not only Kant, but Kant’s disciple Reinhold, who was himself seeking ways to redeem elements of Kant’s practical philosophy. As an alternative both to Reinhold and to Kant (who shared aspects of Maimon’s criticism of Reinhold), Maimon proposes that the motive for every action must involve some “original pleasurable feeling” (angenehmes Gefühl), the basis of which lies in an analogy between the common human understanding and the “drive (Trieb) for cognition.” 44 It is not entirely clear what this “original pleasurable feeling” is; Maimon states only that it does not arise as a result of custom. It does however require Maimon to distinguish between “higher” and “lower” pleasures, based upon their connection to or interference with the pursuit of intellectual perfection. Even though Maimon concedes that the pleasure accompanying cognition of truth may admit of degrees — truths concerning principles are more satisfying to know than particulars — the fact of pleasure remains identical for knowledge of all truths. We note in passing that, given the need to distinguish higher and lower pleasures, Maimon’s Stoicism becomes all the more significant, as the instrument for discrimination. In a curious nesting of assertions from one of his final essays, “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality” of 1798, Maimon professes once again his commitment to Stoic virtue as a vehicle for liberating the will and for pursuing the sovereignty of intellectual perfection. Maimon’s profession of Stoicism is therefore at home, at least in part, in Kant’s own rejection of the influence of passion and inclination on the formation of an unconditionally good will. At the same time, the severity of Maimon’s Stoicism is mitigated by his high-brow Epicureanism, a result of his Maimonidean commitment to pursuit of intellectual perfection as the highest good. Maimon’s concept of virtue becomes a meeting point, in short, for 43. GW III: 116. 44. KU, 241. GW VII: 243

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Maimonidean eudaimonism and Kantian abstention from inclination. In Maimon’s practical philosophy, Maimonides and Epictetus, Aristotle and Kant, join hands. As in his doctrine of intellect, the central issue emerging in Maimon’s moral thought is a problem of the unity of mind and nature, theory and practice — a problem reflected in his own interweaving of historical influences. At the core of this issue is the more fundamental problem of reconciling reason and will. In his Attempt, Maimon puts the matter this way: Truth and duty in fact possess a common essential characteristic, namely, universal validity. I cannot recognize as true what cannot hold as true for every other rational being. I could not will as a duty what another rational being is unable to will. I therefore generalize both propositions by making the characteristic common to both a predicate. From this there results the following proposition: a rational being can, as such a being, only determine itself by modifications that it recognizes to be universally valid. But this proposition, in regard to the cognition of truth, is given to us as a fact of consciousness, and its possibility is proven by its actual use. Its reality must therefore also be admitted with regard to duty.45 Given Maimon’s desire to ground the universal validity of duty in the universal drive for truth, the ensuing parallelism of truth and duty reveals the unity of human moral and intellectual consciousness. He writes: “It is there, from the drive to cognition of truth, that the moral law [the Categorical Imperative] is derived, obedience to which belongs therefore to the acquisition of the moral good.” 46 Will, which now means for Maimon “the drive for cognition of the truth belonging to the power of cognition”; action, “producing the truth according to the laws of the power of cognition”; and end, “the truth produced,” are all “intimately united.” This unity of will, action, and end should remind us once more of Maimon’s appropriation of Maimonides’ concept of divine intellect, 45. See Attempt. In his undated letter to Reinhold, Maimon writes: “You appeal, in view of moral feeling, to the healthy human understanding. But should one not ask: what is the criterion for this healthy human understanding? And how can one label that claim, which psychology explains as illusion, a claim to healthy human understanding?” (GW IV: 250–55). 46. Attempt, GW IV: 452.

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whose inner unity of being, action, and end ensures the unity of understanding with sensibility. The motto with which Maimon concludes his Attempt, and which also appears on the frontispiece of his Philosophical Dictionary — “vitam impendere vero” — holds both for intellect and for will.47 It is this body of conviction, theoretical and practical, that shapes Maimon’s departure from Kant in the final two years of his life.

47. “Devote one’s life to the truth.” The passage is from Juvenal, Satires IV, 91. The passage also appears in a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the artist Maurice Quentin de la Tour (1704–1788).

The Last Essays: Commentary Y_Z Maimon’s departure from Kant had of course been brewing for a while. Although clearly indebted to Kant’s philosophical system, Maimon repaid that debt by calling into question the basic premises of Kant’s thought. In the words of David Baumgardt: “In his last years, the acute, critical Maimon seems to have realized that he had labored in vain to salvage one or the other central position of Kant’s ethics.” 48 In his final essays, the special object of Maimon’s interest is, broadly speaking and with but one exception, Kantian moral psychology. That one exception, “Explanation of a Well-known Anthropological Phenomenon,” deals with general names and the problem of acquiring language. The remaining essays treat a group of issues that signal Maimon’s drift away from Kantian ethical doctrine, and consider, in particular, the various moods, desires, and bodily modifications that influence our will and with it, our moral judgment. The first essay, “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality,” sets the tone for the rest. In form, it resembles two other earlier essays of Maimon’s, his “Attempt at a New Presentation of the Principle of Morality and a New Deduction of its Reality” of 1794, and his “On the Ultimate Grounds of Natural Right,” of the following year. An introductory section summarizes the main problem Maimon wishes to address and gives his 48. Baumgardt, David. “The Ethics of Salomon Maimon.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 1, no. 2 (December 1963): 206. 21

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solution, while the remainder of the essay contains a series of definitions, theorems, and proofs, offering a scrupulously detailed deduction of his conclusions. This approach is interesting for its appearance of systematic rigor, an appearance both fitting and ironic: fitting for an argument that Maimon claims is “the first to establish the causes of morality,” and ironic for an argument that erodes confidence in the Kantian system of ethics. For Kant, the principle of morality, given in the “common human understanding,” is the concept of duty, the basis for his celebrated Categorical Imperative.49 Maimon, on the other hand, argues as follows. The principle of morality cannot be located in a concept of duty, for two reasons: first, duty is consequent to virtue, since virtue is perfection of the will (a concept Maimon gathers originally from Christian Wolff), while duty is at best an instrument of that perfection; and second, the common human understanding on which the concept of duty is supposedly based is prone to error — “psychological delusion,” as Maimon, deploying a familiar Kantian trope, elsewhere calls it.50 In that case, one could not demonstrate with absolute certitude that Kant’s moral principle actually determined the will to act in categorically rational ways, as Kant had claimed, but only hypothetical ones: if the fact of the common human understanding is true, and not based upon a deception, one ought to do x. In other words, even though the concept of duty issues categorical imperatives, they are at best the causae formalis of moral action, not demonstrably its causae efficiens; merely because moral reason ought to determine the will is no proof that it actually does so in particular instances. Maimon’s correction of Kant begins by positing the “unambiguous fact” that human beings, like all natural beings, possess an innate drive to reach their perfection. Maimon’s introduction of the notion of drive shows his debt to Spinoza. Three Spinozistic formulations in particular are significant for Maimon’s argument: that all natural beings possess a conatus, a striving to persevere in being; that this striving, when accompanied by consciousness of the striving, constitutes desire; and that beings cannot admit contrary drives.51 Maimon, following suit, indicates that a drive in general represents “the inner tendency” of a being “to exercise a force,” accompanied by a “pleasant feeling” arising when this drive is satisfied. In 49. See Kant, Groundwork, Section I. 50. See, for example, “The Moral Skeptic,” 279; Attempt, GW IV: 404. 51. See Spinoza, Ethics, IIIp6; IIIp9; IIIp5.

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animals, the satisfaction of these drives is determined by laws of nature.52 In human beings, however, the drive for perfection is “most curious,” and “constitutes the sublimity of his nature.” This drive for perfection is satisfied only by a moral law; our consciousness of this drive arises only when it exercises itself against another, competing drive. The satisfaction of natural drives Maimon names “musts”; a rational drive however is an “ought.” A natural drive is a “must” because its satisfaction is compelled: it is a natural necessity, for example, that all living beings are driven to maintain themselves in existence. By contrast, Maimon (following Kant) christens a rational drive an “ought” because it involves choice, and therefore freedom; for example, human beings (unlike other beings) have, qua human, a drive to be rational, but a choice whether or not to exercise their reason. Maimon concludes, in light of this distinction, that no appeals need be made to a common human understanding to ground moral law. Duty has its basis only in our consciousness of a rational drive; it is our consciousness of this drive, Maimon wishes to stress, rather than the drive itself, that raises the issue of freedom. In that event, duty must have a basis in virtue, since virtue means perfection of the will, and therewith of human freedom. As Maimon puts it, “According to me (just as according to the Stoics), there is only a single virtue: self-control, or the acquired power to determine the will against all sensuous drives and inclinations.” This statement should be familiar to readers of Maimon’s Autobiography. The accent here falls on the word “sensuous,” since virtue so conceived is itself a drive, for perfection of the will. Here, though, Maimon recognizes a dilemma: why act in a virtuous manner and resist sensuous inclinations when virtue is itself a sort of inclination? That “collision” between competing inclinations would seem inevitably to pit virtue against itself. Even though “duty in general…follows from the concept of virtue,” how are we to determine in particular instances which inclinations to satisfy? Maimon argues that to discriminate such instances rational laws must come into play; they represent “a condition for the possible uses of virtue.” Rational laws are henceforth instruments by which virtue displays itself in action, commanding the duties to which our drive 52. In his Attempt (GW VI: 422–32), Maimon offers this example: “The caterpillar senses a drive within itself, at a time determined by nature, to be transformed into a butterfly, and it is conscious of the state immediately determined in it by this development.”

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for perfection compels us, and sustained by feelings of gratification that accompany the satisfaction of this drive. Virtue, he concludes, “affords the purest, most enduring, and ever-increasing happiness.” (189/476) In this “ontology” (if you will) of the moral life, Maimon believes he has unified “all the different moral principles that have been posited so far”: Stoic, Wolffian, Aristotelian-Maimonidean, and Kantian.53 From Stoicism, resistance to inclination as the highest virtue, a thought shared in part by Kant; from Wolff, the concept of perfection as the aim of the moral life; from the Aristotelian-Maimonidean tradition, the notion that happiness is in the end the summum bonum accompanying the attainment of our human highest perfection; and from Kant, the notions of duty and law as both the causa formalis and causal efficiens of morality — notions Kant himself, in Maimon’s view, left unresolved. Maimon’s attempt at a synthesis of those Kantian concepts he believes is at the same time a historical synthesis, a final answer to the question: is there a duty to live morally? Two features of Maimon’s argument are of special note. First, although Kant is Maimon’s official antagonist in this essay, Reinhold is the more immediate target of his criticism. In his Basic Lines for a Theory of the Faculty of Desire, Reinhold sketches an account of the moral drive as a purely rational endeavor, the object of which is the realization of the “form of reason” itself.54 The moral drive is henceforth a “disinterested drive.” Maimon’s attack on Reinhold is not new. In earlier works, he had repeatedly criticized Reinhold directly or indirectly on this issue.55 Here, he argues that the concept “disinterested drive” is an oxymoron: “According to me,” Maimon writes, “every drive is selfish and unselfish in the same way: since, according to my account, no drive precedes the idea of a pleasant feeling, and the pleasant feeling accompanies every drive in general.” A moral drive is therefore as subject to emotion and inclination as a natural, “animal” drive. Virtue, “perfection of the will” through suppression of inclination and emotion, does not silence pleasure; it merely liberates the 53. Christian Wolff (1679–1754), German Enlightenment scholar and philosopher. 54. See Reinhold’s “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie,” and “Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögen.” A valuable collection of essays concerning Reinhold is Karl Leonard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. George di Giovanni (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer, 2010), especially the essay by Karianne Marx on Reinhold’s Briefe, 145–60. 55. See for example Maimon’s Attempt; also GW IV, “Letter from the Author to Herr Professor Reinhold,” 225–34.

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will to pursue its highest moral possibilities by suppressing the lowest. A second interesting feature of Maimon’s argument in this essay is what might be called a “moral-physical parallelism,” which culminates in an elaboration of morality from physical drives. This, too, is an aspect of Maimon’s debt to Spinoza: in brief, if nature, living and non-living, human and non-human, is determined by obedience to law, there seems little basis for sharply distinguishing moral and natural laws. Importantly, it is the gradual withering of the autonomy of the moral from the natural, upon which Kant insisted, which marks the arguments of the subsequent essays of his final years. A case in point is his next essay, “The Great Personage” of 1799. The stated purpose of this essay is to explain the greatness of great persons, that “most honorable” of titles. Just as, according to the previous essay, there are higher and lower pleasures, there are accordingly higher and lower states of character, a proposition more familiar from Aristotle than from Kant. The essay is divided as follows. First, Maimon follows his familiar procedure, defining certain metaphysical concepts and terminology in advance of exploring the phenomenon of greatness. Second, he discusses the concept of greatness initially in light of concepts of mathematical magnitude; this discussion, drawn from Kant’s account of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment, culminates in a notion of “aesthetic greatness.” 56 Maimon then deploys the aesthetic orientation of this discussion to examine human appearances of greatness, in the form of various “gifts of nature” (another allusion to Kantian aesthetics): physical size and strength; heroism; genius; ingenuity and wit; intelligence.57 These considerations culminate in the conclusion that all instances of human greatness are “grounded solely in the power the subject acquires to master itself and to withstand its inclinations”; only “self-control and resistance to inclinations” can make a person great (recalling his definition of virtue 56. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner H. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), §§25, 26. 57. For Kant, physical size and strength are aesthetic phenomena in the broadest sense: they are objects of perception that may also provoke a subjective feeling, of fear, perhaps, or of delight. While heroism and intelligence are not in themselves aesthetic qualities, Maimon draws them into the domain of the aesthetic by classifying them “gifts of nature” (Naturgabe), a term Kant reserves for genius. Finally, ingenuity and wit can be properties of works of art — a poem or an essay, for example — and therefore fit broadly into the aesthetic.

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from the previous essay). Genius and wit may prepare someone intellectually for greatness, but in the last analysis human greatness is a function of will and not of intellect. This judgment seems puzzling, given Maimon’s earlier insistence on the inevitable sovereignty of intellectual perfection. To underscore it, Maimon considers the various moods associated with human “inferiority” — with the “small person” — an explanation he approaches neither aesthetically nor ethically, but medically, in light of what we would nowadays identify as psychosomatic illnesses: hypochondria, mood disorders, being senseless, delusion, and finally lunacy. All of these diseases of the intellect, Maimon holds (and will repeat again in his “Letters to Herr Peina” and “Sophistic of the Human Heart”), can be overcome only by strength of will rather than of intellect; physical weakness and moral weakness enjoy the same cure. But while healthy bodies cannot be mandated, healthy souls are a sublime duty, and consist in the manner in which we use our free will. Maimon illustrates this proposition with examples: statesmen, poets, and warriors. While “nature and fortune might have appointed” someone to an important and useful post, they do not guarantee this person will be counted a “great personage.” Rather, greatness is found in individuals whose strength of character masters their abundance of ideas, a notion again reminiscent of Kant’s insistence, in his account of genius, that a “wealth of ideas” can result in chaotic nonsense without the discipline of aesthetic form.58 Maimon’s emphasis on strength of will over strength of intellect is interesting, given the sole example of a paradigmatically great personage Maimon names in this essay: Moses. Unlike Maimonides but like Spinoza, Maimon portrays Moses as a great legislator rather than as a prophet.59 His intellectual perfection — “innate talent, genius, education (in an Egyptian court) and instruction (in every Egyptian branch of knowledge)” — prepared him for political and moral greatness. Moses’s combination of intellect and will revealed itself in the “great plan” he devised: “liberating his slavishly oppressed nation, developing its moral character, and giving it a political existence.” To accomplish this task, however, Moses had to reject the contradiction intrinsic to the ancient 58. Kant, Critique of Judgment, AA 5, §46–49. 59. See Samuel Atlas, “Moses in the Philosophy of Maimonides, Spinoza, and Solomon Maimon.” Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. 25 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1954): 360–400.

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Jewish patriarchal idea of God as “self-subsistent cause” and as “most wise and just”: the first case reveals a God that has no special relation to humanity, while the second is, in Maimon’s words, “anthropomorphic.” The Patriarchs arrived at the first idea of God by observing nature’s general purposiveness; they arrived at the second by observing “their own individual state.” The contrast between the generality of natural laws and the individual character of human laws expresses a breach between natural and moral orders central to the patriarchal idea of God. It is at the same time reminiscent of Kant’s description of the world, suffering from a rupture between natural and moral realms.60 Moses’s solution to this rupture is equally Kantian: postulating an omnipotent and supremely good God whose existence guarantees agreement between natural and moral realms. The Mosaic idea of God, unlike the patriarchal idea of God, is therefore “the almighty God (ruling all nature)” named “Jehova (postulated by ‘what will be’),” thereby bringing together in one idea an is and an ought. In Maimon’s words, the Mosaic God “demands a natural order of things appropriate to the moral order.” It is this idea of God that gives Moses confidence in the face of all dangers, inspiring him to emulate “the possible approximation to the idea of a holy moral being through freedom.” One sign of Moses’s greatness is his longevity without suffering any of the usual signs of senescence — such as wrinkles and poor eyesight. Maimon concludes that what “seems to indicate only a natural phenomenon…actually indicates a moral phenomenon!” Will, rather than intellect, perfects body. If Moses is the paradigmatic great personage, is then the great personage in its highest instance a legislator rather than a philosopher? It is curious that Maimon never mentions philosophers among his categories of great personages — statesmen, poets, and warriors. The omission of the philosopher recalls Maimon’s self-characterization from his Autobiography, exempting himself from the legions of the great: 60. In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant argues that the idea of God arises not from Revelation, but from the need to postulate a supremely moral and omnipotent being as the condition for the possibility of a morally harmonious cosmos, proportioning happiness to duty (AA 6:5–6). Kant writes: “Morality… leads inexorably to religion, by which it is extended to the idea of a legislator apart from human beings, in whose will the final goal (of creation) can and ought at the same time to be the final goal of humanity.”

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“I am not, to be sure, a great man, a philosopher of the world, or a buffoon…But what does that matter? I love the truth, and where the truth is at stake, I do not ask myself about the devil or his grandmother.”61 The implied distinction between the great personage, as legislator-statesman, and the lover of truth covertly subordinates the political to the philosophical. The philosopher cannot be restricted by particular achievements, however great, but follows truth wherever it leads. The inevitable skepticism of the philosopher eschews “founding” for “finding”; Maimon’s judgment recalls Aristotle’s preference for the intellectual probity of the philosopher over the magnanimity of the great-souled personage. The essay, “The Moral Skeptic,” shows what this means in practice. Finally, we may note that, at least superficially, Maimon’s Moses bears a closer resemblance to Spinoza’s than to Maimonides’ philosopher-prophet, although all three agree about Moses’s stature as a political founder.62 However, as Maimon points out in the Autobiography, deploying a term from Spinoza, Maimonides’ Guide was in fact a theological-political treatise: Maimon’s Moses draws Maimonides and Spinoza closer together.63 At the same time, it reveals what to Maimon (and to Spinoza and, most controversially, to Maimonides) is Judaism’s essentially political character.64 61. Autobiography, 123. The phrase “philosopher of the world” is meant to be pejorative. It refers to a work of popular enlightenment (Philosoph für die Welt, Leipzig, 1775–1777) by Johann Jakob Engel, a friend of Moses Mendelssohn, as Maimon makes clear in his “A Sample of Rabbinic Philosophy” (BM, vol. 14:172/ GW I: 590). See also Gideon Freudenthal, “Rabbinische Weisheit oder Rabbinische Philosophie? Salomon Maimons Kritik an Mendelssohn und Weisel.” Mendelssohn-Studien 14, ed. Hans-Günter Klein and Christoph Schulte (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2005): 31–64; and Christoph Böhr, Philosophie für die Welt: Die Popularphilosophie der deutschen Spätaufklarung in Zeitalter Kants (Stuttgart: Frommen-Holzboog, 2003). 62. See Atlas, op. cit.; also Autobiography, 133. 63. Autobiography: 133, n.1. Leo Strauss, for one, was indebted to Maimon for drawing the connection between the theological-political problem in Spinoza and Maimonides’ argument in the Guide; see “The Place of the Doctrine of Providence According to Maimonides,” in Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 326n34. 64. As Maimon writes in the Autobiography (236): “The Jewish nation has always been an aristocracy disguised as a theocracy. For centuries, the scholars, who make up the nobility of the nation, have used their status as the legislative body to win so much respect from the common people that they can do whatever they want with the people,” an assertion with decided Machiavellian overtones; cf. Discourses on

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Maimon’s essays, “The Great Personage” and “The Moral Skeptic,” comprise the most significant achievements of his final years. Between them, though, falls a brief essay, “Explanation of a Well-Known Anthropological Phenomenon.” While “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality” takes its bearings from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and “The Great Personage” is oriented by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, this essay reflects on a brief passage from Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Its argument takes up the issue of how a child moves from referring to himself in the third person (for example, “Karl wants to eat!”) to the first person. What is at stake in this interesting “anthropological phenomenon” is however a question about the development and unity of self-consciousness. According to the passage of Kant’s that Maimon quotes at the outset of his essay, “a light seems to dawn” on the child, “as it were.” The dawning light signals the rudiments of self-consciousness, expressed linguistically and conceptually: “Before he merely felt himself,” Kant writes, “now he thinks himself.” Still, Kant admits being puzzled by the causes of this phenomenon, “the explanation of which might be rather difficult for the anthropologist.” In the remainder of the essay, Maimon boldly embraces the task of explaining. Maimon begins with two observations: first, that the issue here is not restricted only to the personal pronoun, “I,” but extends equally to “you” (he offers the charming example, “Father beats me!” instead of “You’re beating me!”); and second, that pronouns are not learned in the same manner as other words. In general, children learn to speak when they are shown an object, and someone repeatedly pronounces its name. But what object do you show a child to teach them “I?” How do you show someone the self? Maimon further observes in this connection that pointing to a child and saying “I,” or at oneself and pronouncing “you,” will only convince the child that his proper name is “I” and yours is “you” — the child will take all personal pronouns for proper names. The problem here is compounded by the child’s discovery of plural “I’s” and “you’s.” “How then,” Maimon asks, “can he find himself ” in a veritable sea of other selves? To make the leap between proper names and personal pronouns, the child must somehow connect “the subject of the discourse (the speaking person)” with “the object of the speaking,” an action requiring “a higher Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), III.I, 209–12.

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degree of reflection and abstraction.” The necessary act of abstraction, Maimon indicates, is encouraged by the child’s discovery of this plurality of others, all of whom speak the word “I” of themselves, just as they say “you” of all others. The recognition that personal pronouns are not proper names begins with the discovery of a range of other speakers. But it does not end there. The child recognizes his “I,” Maimon writes, “by an inner feeling”: “even before he has learned the word ‘I’ and by his resemblance to similar individuals, this concept forms.” This “inner feeling” recalls Rousseau’s sentiment de soi même, and like it, precedes both speech and reason.65 In this respect, the “I” does not arise as a result of a concept abstracted from the plurality of “I’s” of which the child is aware; it is pre-conceptual. But at the same time the recognition that the word “I” belongs both to self and to others — both to the “speaking subject and to the object of thought” — requires some act of abstraction. Here, Maimon distinguishes between “negative abstraction” and “positive abstraction.” Acts of negative abstraction arise from a recognition of perceived similarities between different objects. For example, the words “spoon” or “knife” are based upon recognition of general characteristics shared by different objects. The “I,” though, could not be acquired in this manner. Negative abstraction might at best yield concepts of “human being” or “animal,” but not of “I,” given its peculiar status as “an absolutely particular object” for which no concept is available. Maimon writes: “The child recognizes his ‘I’ by an inner sensation before he learns to recognize another ‘I’….it will now be necessary to apply the power of abstraction positively, which now must be most difficult, since the ‘I’ is conceived as other than himself, just like the ‘non-I.’ In other words, through an act of positive abstraction, he understands the other who is speaking as, in effect, another “I” and at the same time as “not-I”: “the speaking person thought as the object of the speaking.” The “I” therefore “expresses a highest general object, and at the same time an absolute particular determined by language itself.” 65. See Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Part I. According to Rousseau, the human being in a “pure state of nature” is solitary, pre-rational, and pre-verbal, possessing merely a “feeling of its own existence.” Here, Maimon seems to adapt that Roussseauian characterization to explain the origin of human consciousness in a similar state of pre-rational, pre-verbal, and pre-self-conscious interiority. See The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Maimon’s “explanation,” while brief, is not correspondingly simple. What is at stake is the origins of self-consciousness, which Maimon pursues linguistically rather than psychologically. In this respect, he is following Kant’s lead: The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a  person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person…. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I,” because he still has it in thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I.” 66 According to Kant, the “I” is a concept that precedes language. For Maimon, there can be no concept of the “I,” since there can be no concept of an “absolute particular.” 67 This judgement, in tandem with Maimon’s view that the locus of self-recognition consists in a pre-conceptual inner sense, pulls Maimon’s argument closer to Rousseau than to Kant. “The Moral Skeptic” is perhaps the best-known essay of Maimon’s final years. It is startling in its rejection of any meaningful difference between moral dogmatists and moral skeptics, that is, between those who insist upon a theoretical grounding for ethical life, and those who eschew its very possibility. The former are Kantian proponents of the categorical imperative; the latter are those who reject the formality of Kantian law for laws of nature. Maimon’s essay “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality” had already expressed a skepticism, increasing since his Critical Investigations of 1797, that one could prove that Kant’s supreme moral law enjoyed universal validity on purely rational terms. In “The Moral Skeptic,” Maimon deepens this criticism, arguing that there is no difference between what our moral reason commands us to do and what the laws of nature 66. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 67. Here, Maimon preserves the Kantian view that concepts are always of the general law that determines the nature and function of particular things, but not of the concrete phenomenal thing before us. Maimon’s strategy, here and elsewhere, is to deploy Kant’s concepts in a way that reveals their limits; his critique of Kant is often a hypertrophy of Kant (just as Kant’s critique of reason emerges from a hypertrophy of reason).

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drive us to do. The distinction between what I ought to do and what I will do is, in short, spurious. According to Maimon, “the moral skeptic doubts the fact that the dogmatist considers unambiguous,” that is, that no “material principles,” such as the desire for happiness or the drive for perfection, suffice as a basis for an ethical life. That basis is found only when duty “is laid down as an unambiguous fact of common human reason,” an assertion to which the moral skeptic is deaf. To the moral dogmatist, then, the moral skeptic is both a reductionist and a rogue. On the one hand, rejecting the dogmatist’s belief that the individual is a moral person exceeding all other natural beings, “he reduces the individual to a machine” and therewith consigns him to laws of intractable fatalism.” On the other hand, this skeptical reduction of human to animal constitutes an admission on the part of the skeptic that he is “not only incapable of a moral disposition,” he is also “an enemy of morality…unable even to bear the thought of it.” Maimon’s cheeky reply to the mutual condemnations of dogmatists and skeptics: “Flip a coin!” Maybe, Maimon suggests, the difference between the two is merely apparent? What if, on the one hand, the dogmatist has neither a theoretical nor practical advantage over the skeptic? And what if the skeptic, like the dogmatist, desires a “fact that grounds philosophizing about morality,” but more significantly, “finds nothing more sublime and worthy of human dignity than this very possession” of moral personhood, just as Jacob wished that Joseph had lived, but could not believe it even when told?68 Maimon devotes the remainder of the essay to proving the proximity of moral dogmatists and moral skeptics. In so doing, though, he plants a mine that will raze the bases of Kantian moral philosophy. Maimon begins mapping the terrain of the dogmatists by analyzing the nature of moral imperatives. Grammatically, an imperative commands or advises. A moral imperative is one that involves an act of will. Using Kant, Maimon distinguishes between two sorts of imperatives, hypothetical and categorical.69 While categorical imperatives are absolute, hypothetical imperatives involve an end apart from the act of willing itself; thus, the will of the lord determines the goal of an action, and his knowledge determines how his servant will carry it out. The servant is the condition 68. Genesis 45:26. 69. Kant, Groundwork, 25 (AA 4:414).

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for fulfilling the lord’s will. Both classes of imperative, Maimon states, can be expressed with ought; but in both cases this ought can be replaced by will, both as a future event and as requiring an act of will (Maimon cites as evidence the substitution in Hebrew of an imperative for a future tense). In that event, the difference between categorical and hypothetical imperatives seems to dissolve. Maimon therefore asks: are there any “true” imperatives, an ought that cannot be replaced by a will? The dogmatist responds, “yes!” The “moral-categorical imperative,” he insists, “expresses an ought that cannot be confused with a will without losing its true meaning,” that is, stating that one should allow rational laws to determine the will differs in meaning from the statement, “I will determine” the will by means of rational laws. Owing to the detail with which Maimon’s ensuing analysis explores both the moralist’s position and its skeptical refutation, his argument here does not admit of easy summary. The crux of Maimon’s argument turns on the impossibility of demonstrating that rational laws, rather than laws of nature or natural drives and inclinations, are what actually determine the will — heresy, to a Kantian. The dogmatic view has as its premise the existence of freedom as an a priori fact of human consciousness. The skeptical rejoinder takes this “original fact” to be ambiguous: were it true, moral judgments would be universal to humanity, when in fact they may just as easily have arisen from “certain accidental circumstances” of civilized humanity, which “demand” morality. At best, the dogmatist’s “original fact” serves as a regulative idea for the legality civil society requires to aid human beings in their pursuit of happiness. In that case, there is no way to demonstrate with absolute certainty the pure rationality of human motives and deeds; they may just as easily have arisen from our passions and inclinations. For example, in the second “Letter to Herr Peina,” Maimon writes in response to those who try to speculate that Napoleon’s motives were guided by a moral imperative: “what entitles you to such an assumption? He could have been driven to this end by a higher degree of honor and fame.” To exclude all possible motives “unfit for explaining the given moral action” would require “an infinite power of cognition,” the existence of which cannot be demonstrated. In that case, the “fact” of morality is no longer an unambiguous fact; it survives only through dogmatic assertion. What then of the skeptic? Like the dogmatist, the skeptic strives for the highest good. Like the dogmatist, the skeptic finds nothing more sublime than humanity’s “receptivity to morality.” In general, therefore, “in what

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concerns the exercise of morality,” Maimon writes, “one cannot find the least difference between the dogmatist and the skeptic.” The skeptic’s differences from the dogmatist lie in their respective theoretical approaches: while the dogmatist (as has been shown) grounds morality in a fact of human consciousness, the skeptic explains the emergence of morality on psychological grounds — ”the same way the psychologist tends to explain the origin of the love of money and honor.” Moral demands are like aesthetic judgments, beginning in expediency or pleasure, and later elevated to a demand “for good taste in itself.” The moral skeptic’s disappointment with dogmatic moral theory inclines him to seek solace in the sciences, where he strives to cultivate his reason “by a pretense of greater progress” the sciences seem to have made. Yet, as in moral theory, “much is promised, and little accomplished!” Mathematics, while capable of great certitude, is “narrow minded”; philosophy addresses only the “form” of knowledge without actually knowing anything; natural sciences are scarcely better than “a collection of one-sided observations” and “contrary hypotheses.” The practical sciences — medicine, politics — fare little better. Maimon adds, at the conclusion of his essay, that in spite of his near despair at the failure of our theoretical endeavors, the skeptic still wishes to see the rationality of the moral law reclaimed and justified. Yet the moral skeptic remains, like Moses, on the verge of a promised land to which he is forbidden entrance: “A comforting yet humbling voice calls to him: you may see the desired land from afar, but you may not enter!” Moral dogmatists and moral skeptics, in the end, “are therefore barely distinguished from one another, theoretically and practically.” Temptingly, Maimon adds that the distinction does not matter “esoterically, but only to the exoteric lesson of morality.” The “exoteric lesson” needs to preserve a distinction between dogmatists and skeptics, and therefore between the theoretical and the practical. Esoterically, however, that distinction does not matter. In so stating, Maimon implies that morality needs to preserve, as (so to speak) a “noble lie,” the sharp differences dividing those who defend moral absolutes and those who appear to undercut them; the philosopher however knows that both stand on equally shaky ground. Maimon’s “Letters to Herr Peina,” six in all, continue his skeptical demolition of moral purity.70 The first letter begins with Maimon’s 70. Salman Nathan Peina (1737–?), a friend and supporter of Maimon. The anonymous author of Maimoniana, writing after Maimon’s death, refers to Herr Peina

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gratitude to Peina for the assistance he’s given him in seeking to publish what he seems to recognize will be his final work: “Should I not get a publisher,” he writes, “my writings can still appear as oeuvres posthumes,” a reference, perhaps, to what will follow, his uncompleted manuscript, “Sophistic of the Human Heart.” Gratitude, Maimon admits, is challenging; while doing everything in his power to remain independent, when it comes to the kindness of strangers, “it is no viler to be fed like a dog or a raven,” an allusion to the Mishnah. The reference is telling; it speaks to a difference between the learned and unlearned.71 In the Mishnah telling, Rabbi Judah, who wishes only to feed the learned, is chastened, and winds up feeding all who come to his grainary, not only the learned. What follows for Maimon, on the other hand, is a distinction between Erdmenschen, “people of the earth” (a term with a complex Hebrew and Yiddish lineage), and Weise, “students of wisdom.” 72 The former are incapable of elevating their minds above sensation and imagination; the latter exert themselves to rise above sensation, on both intellectual and moral planes. They dwell in the regions of “pure understanding” and “pure reason.” Their transcendence of sensation and imagination spells a transcendence of the body as well: reason and will act independently of corporeal organization and are in fact strengthened by opposition to the body. Wisdom therefore increases and renews itself, even as the strength of the body vanishes in old age. In the final analysis, then, Maimon hopes for a radical intellectualism (of an Aristotelian variety) rather than the as Maimon’s “admirer, friend, and benefactor, and all these to the highest degree” (Maimoniana: oder Rhapsodien zur Charakteristik Salomon Maimons, compiled by Sabbatia Joseph Wolff, [Berlin, G. Hanh, 1813], 255.) Although these documents are letters, they are not placed with Maimon’s correspondance in the Gesammelte Schriften but are located with his final essays. Hence their inclusion here. 71. See Bava Batra 8a. 72. The Hebrew term ‘am ha-aretz (literally, “people of the earth”) makes an appearance in second-century literature, where it refers especially to the uneducated, and especially regarding matters of Jewish observance; see, for example, Mishnah Demai 2:3, and Avot 2:5. For the development of this term, see Aharon Oppenheimer, The ‘Am Ha-Aretz, trans. I. H. Levine (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 114–16. I am grateful to Professor David H. Aaron (HUC Cincinnati) for his help with tracing Hebrew references to ‘am ha-aretz and their various meanings. In German and Yiddish, the term Erdmensch has the sense of “gnome” or “dwarf,” but also (in general) an ignoramus. I am grateful to Professor Jordan Finkin (HUC Cincinnati) for his explanation of possible Yiddish connotations.

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Mishnah’s admonition to feed soul and body both (ironic, given Maimon’s own state of dissipation). The second letter carries on the theme of differences between “high” and “low,” but on the plane of will rather than intellect. Maimon begins by distinguishing between absolute and relative freedom of the will, a distinction familiar in his last writings from his essay, “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality.” Absolute freedom is exhibited in a subject’s power “to determine the will against all motives that can be given through empirical objects”; it can be “thought” and “postulated” by the moral law, but never known. It is our nearest approximation to divinity. Relative freedom concerns the power to determine the will against certain motives, but only by means of other, more potent or higher motives. This sort of freedom constitutes the “human greatness” of the individual, attained by practice and admitting of degrees. These remarks recall Maimon’s reflections on greatness in “The Great Personage.” Now, however, his example of greatness is no longer Moses, but Napoleon. Napoleon’s greatness is a relative greatness: we are astonished by his actions not because we believe his will was determined by the moral law, “with peace and comfort in the back of his mind”; rather, he was able to resist the siren call of peace and comfort “by a motive that seems even more powerful to individuals of a higher cultivation,” for example, love of honor or reputation. Napoleon’s greatness is therefore determined by “the number and strength” of the motives he had to sacrifice on his way to that greatness. The third letter now shifts the locus of greatness, from strength of will to “intellectual daring.” Just as the first letter distinguished between “people of the earth” and wise souls, this letter distinguishes average persons from distinctive individuals, that is, between those who possess prodigious intellectual gifts but lack daring, and those with those same gifts together with a certain fearlessness. Maimon’s entrée into this theme is a challenge from Peina regarding an unanswered letter; what follows is Maimon’s reflection on his ideal reader. “There is perhaps no one who likes to correspond with others as much in speech as in writing as I do,” Maimon admits. But his correspondent must be capable of setting aside “common prejudices” acquired through custom and education. Someone may even possess significant talents, “but if he lacks courage, boldness, and determination, he is to me an average person” whose company Maimon will eschew. Repeating the Horatian admonition Kant borrows for his essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, Maimon confesses that he avoids “a

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certain person” who, while wonderfully refined, “did not sufficiently heed the motto sapere aude,” or “dare to be wise.” 73 Importantly, for Maimon, the sphere of those daring and enlightened souls is small. The “director of the theatre of the world” has assigned roles to each; and all do not play the same role. To keep order on the unruly human stage, the “practical skeptic” plays the role of prompter, reminding the actors of their proper roles. In any case, Maimon admits, the whole of life amounts to a sort of role-playing: “Everyone plays his role as naturally as possible, but not too naturally. One must never forget that it is merely a role one has assumed to play, otherwise he makes of the play something serious.” The practical skeptic, prompter in the moral theatre, reminds the actors that their roles are artificial and provisional; “practical principles,” Maimon asserts, “are grounded in illusions.” This admission is indeed a curious and alarming one. It is however in keeping with Maimon’s concession, in the previous essays, of the impossibility of an absolute or “pure” moral knowledge. The moral is invariably a realm of incompletion. The final three letters address specific persons. The fourth letter begins with praise of Johann Benjamin Erhard, after the fashion of the previous letter.74 Erhard is an individual who attracts “educated, unprejudiced people of talent and insight” and conducts his professional affairs “with genius and judgment,” without allowing his intellectual curiosity to be limited by his profession. Recently, Peina has made his acquaintance. Peina, however, wishes to learn Maimon’s judgment on the theoretical and practical merits of “the Brownian system,” at the core of which is a consideration of the nature of the organic, and the relationship between the organic and the inorganic.75 After admonishing Peina to ask Erhard to explain this system, Maimon approaches this question, first, by considering the nature of systems in general. In the rigorous sense, he states, a system must possess certainty and simplicity in its principles. The Brownian system, Maimon points out, seems to possess these qualities. Now, if these principles are true, grounded in experience, and explanatory, the 73. Horace, Epodes 1, 2, 40. 74. Johann Benjamin Erhard (1766–1827), a German physician and philosopher in the circle of Immanuel Kant, and author of a work of political philosophy: Über das Recht des Volkes zu einer Revolution” (Jena und Leipzig: Christian Ernst Gabler, 1795). 75. “The Brownian system” refers to the system of botanical classification devised by Robert Brown (1773–1858), celebrated later for his discovery of “Brownian motion.”

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system based upon them would be both theoretically and practically superior to others. But this point remains contested; opponents of the system (presumably scientists favoring an entirely mechanical account of things) accuse it of lacking the very systematic rigor Brown claims for it, just as Brown’s opponents are accused of the same lack of rigor. Maimon supposes, however, that the truth, “like Aristotelian virtue,” lies in a mean between these extremes. Regardless of whether a being, animate or inanimate, is subject to mechanical and chemical laws, this fact does not make the being in question an inanimate machine. Instead, it should be thought of as a being which is subject to external mechanical or chemical forces that themselves are subordinate to organic and “animal laws.” In this way, the being in question is defined by the conservation and increase of its “vital powers.” Quoting Proverbs 18.14 regarding illness, Maimon concludes that cure of illness depends upon an “unspoiled inner sense” or “innate instinct”; otherwise, the vital power can act as deceptively as a false conscience. Maimon’s subordination of the mechanical to the organic suggests a preference for Aristotle over Kant and Newton. It is of a piece with his previous blurring of the differences between natural and rational laws, between animal drives and moral strivings. In the fifth letter, Maimon responds to a second request of Peina’s: to explain his dissatisfaction with Fichte. Fichte, Maimon confesses, is someone he greatly respects, deserving of “genuine friendship” in spite of their philosophical differences, owing to Fichte’s “great acumen, his zeal for the cause of truth and virtue, and especially because of his free, open manner” — all qualities that illustrate Maimon’s account of his perfect correspondent, from the third letter. In spite of these fine intellectual and moral qualities, however, Maimon still takes issue with the manner of Fichte’s philosophizing: it’s more subtle than thorough, more a play of the imagination than a rigorous methodological procedure. Maimon, though, is more interested in Fichte’s power to annoy Kantians. Kantians hate Fichte for his claim to understand Kant not only better than anyone else, but better than Kant understood himself! They are like the sultan Mohammed II, Maimon writes, who put the Alexandrian library to the torch, assuming the Koran already contained all wisdom, and every other book was superfluous. For dedicated Kantians, Maimon points out, Kant is their Koran, comprehensive and true. Meanwhile, theologians and politicians worry that Fichte’s political

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writings could be dangerous. Finally, “other poor devils” are simply jealous of Fichte’s fame. It is this final point Maimon now wishes to probe. Envy, he writes, is entirely natural and in some important ways salutary. It injures when it provokes “persistent brooding” over one’s personal defects. But it is salutary if it awakens a desire for emulation, that is, a striving to correct these defects: envy then “becomes instead the bearer of all virtues.” While it is certain that every instance of envy does not inspire emulation, emulation “always begins in envy.” What then of virtue? “Love of virtue,” Maimon asserts, “also begins with envy,” an assertion guaranteed to alarm any dedicated Kantian. But perhaps not. Kant famously praises nature for inspiring “endless competitive vanity, the insatiable desire to possess and to rule,” without which humanity’s natural capacities “would remain forever dormant.” In his Critique of Judgment, Kant goes so far as to claim that a “culture of discipline,” born from the need to learn self-restraint, prepares humanity for genuine morality, but does not go so far as to create it.76 Here, Maimon and Kant differ. Over time, Maimon thinks, one may come to love virtue for its own sake. But before one recognizes its “intrinsic value,” virtue tends to be loved “for other motives,” a judgment in keeping with the way Maimon has been treating virtue and morality all along in his final years. Human greatness arises in part owing to “a tickle of vanity”; in the development of human nature, freedom of the will is preceded by animal drives; moderation and self-restraint arise initially from the discovery that unrestrained passions cannot be satisfied. In this letter, Maimon concludes that while “no one can make himself taller by an inch,” the envious desire for equality with others can only be attained by the use of free will, not through any “natural” gifts. “They therefore place the highest value” in their use of free will, and “will become Stoics, or perhaps something better.” A quote from Ecclesiastes — “I saw that toil and skill in all things come from one’s envy of others” — confirms his view that envy is the source of all human skill. The quote from Ecclesiastes in fact hints at an alternate and at least equally potent influence on Maimon’s argument: the rabbinic concept of yetzer ha-ra. Every human being, according to rabbinic teaching, is possessed of a “good inclination” — yetzer ha-tov — and an “evil inclination” — yetzer ha-ra. The evil inclination compasses lusts and appetites that 76. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Appendix §83.

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can be mastered by self-control, as Maimon suggests in his allusion here to Stoicism. More significantly, though, the evil inclination acts as an incitement to the good. Thus, in a midrash on Genesis Rabbah 9:7, we read: “Without the evil inclination [yetzer ha-ra]…no one would build a house, take a wife, and beget children”; the midrash continues by citing the same passage from Ecclesiastes Maimon cites. There is little question that these rabbinic sources deeply influenced Maimon’s thinking here. The sixth and final letter illustrates this thesis with an attack on the medical profession. Medicine, Maimon states, is not a science, as some suppose, but an art. All so-called medical sciences are at best instrumental to the medical art. As a result, no specified regimen of studies makes one a physician: a certain natural genius for medicine, armed with a practical power of judgment, makes the successful doctor. This fact alone should elevate the prestige of doctors in the public esteem, since individuals of true genius are rare. But “the rabble” consider all doctors to be omnipotent, owing not to their art but to their science; the public assumes there exists a specified number of diseases to which the doctor, with his theoretical knowledge, applies the specified remedies.77 In fact, Maimon argues, disease tends to increase where belief in the power of doctors grows. People will deliberately ruin their health fully expecting that the doctor will cure them. Doctors are like priests in a confessional, fostering bad behavior precisely by forgiving it. The medical absolution compensates for a life of self-abuse. Maimon’s final paragraph laments that it is no longer possible for him to compose an essay Peina apparently proposed. At the same time, he instructs Peina to request Herr ** to return an essay Maimon sent him nearly six months before. “I don’t shake my essays out of my sleeve,” he writes. “I can’t leave them in unfamiliar hands.” With these remarks, Maimon’s final published work concludes with what, in retrospect, is an intimation of his mortality, unapologetic and acute. In 77. This remark involves an element of self-parody. In his Autobiography (I.14), Maimon recalls his medical studies under the tutelage of two textbooks. Maimon writes: “For every disease, one finds a definition, its cause, its symptoms, cures, and even proper prescriptions.” When he turned to practice, however, he swiftly noticed that “the whole thing was quite comical. If a patient told me a few of the symptoms he was feeling, I would diagnose the disease and then draw conclusions about the remaining symptoms. If the sick person then said he didn’t have those symptoms, I would stubbornly insist that they must be present as well.” See Autobiography, 60–61.

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these last letters, Maimon encapsulates the major preoccupations of his last years: human greatness, and where his true health lay: in the excellence of intellectual acumen, rather than the vagaries of the body. There would, however, be one more essay of Maimon’s published, roughly a year after his death: “Sophistic of the Human Heart.” This posthumous essay is preceded by remarks from the editor of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, Johann Erich Biester, who had published several of Maimon’s essays over the course of his life.78 “The essay,” Biester revealed, “is only a fragment,” concluding with Maimon stating: “to be developed in future.” However fragmentary, though, the essay represents the final work Maimon intended for publication. The essay contains the following sections: “Sophistic of the Human Heart” (also, the overall title for the work); “Origin of Moral Good and Evil”; “The Origin of Human Folly”; and “On the Emotions in General.” As these titles suggest, the themes of the essay fall broadly along ethical lines, but with special attention paid to the role of emotion and its power to affect moral judgment. Maimon begins the essay by recalling a distinction, familiar from Kant, between the “power of desire” and the “power of cognition.” The former belongs to the heart, as it is determined by pleasure and displeasure; the latter belongs to the head, and therefore to relations of ideas. For Kant, the power of desire compasses reason and freedom as they relate to humanity’s final purpose, while the power of cognition is restricted in its exercise to understanding the laws of nature.79 For Kant, these two powers stand opposed. For Maimon, however, they are linked through a mutual propensity for sophistries, to which both head and heart, science and morality are prone. And while the intellectual sophistries may be familiar enough, the sophistries of the heart “are not easy to see.” The goal of this essay is to smoke them out. A sophistry, in Maimon’s telling, is essentially a false judgment. Maimon first identifies the origin of the “sophistries of the head” in sense perceptions. While “pure” perceptions (namely, those unmixed with judgments) are free from sophistries, sophistries tend to arise with “mixed” perceptions and feelings. Thus, for example, based upon the sophistical conviction that whatever seems to me is at is seems, I will misjudge the convergence of a line in an angle, committing a sophistry. 78. Johann Erich Biester (1749–1816). 79. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Introduction, §9:36 (AA 5:198).

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This sort of sophistry has no effect upon the power of desire. Whether or not a line converges in a certain manner or remains parallel does not in itself incite either pleasure or displeasure; whatever pleasure or displeasure are associated with it arises owing to some interest someone might have in the result. Similarly, feelings for truth and justice are not immediately generated by “the pure idea of truth and justice,” but arise “by means of other ideas directly related to that feeling,” that then are transferred to these ideas. These two different relations to ideas, one indifferent, the other passionate, are like the difference between a judge and an aggrieved party: unlike the victim of an injustice, the judge disapproves of the unjust action without any emotional attachment to it. Maimon observes in this connection that “zeal for matters of truth and virtue always reveal an impure source….a holy zeal is in fact quite unholy” (an observation that recalls Maimon’s comments about Hasidism in his Autobiography).80 Emotions corrupt the objectivity of ideas. As with justice, so with truth. While “one truth is not more truth than another truth,” we feel more strongly about certain truths than about others when a greater “degree of conviction” attaches to it, either because it agrees with other truths, or because of the difficulty involved with acquiring it, or because it affords us “a means to other ends.” As is the case with virtue, the more significant those ends, the greater the pleasure. What is immediately at stake for Maimon is moral purity, that is, the purity of our feelings for truth and virtue. Throughout Kant’s writings, the demand for purity looms large, especially in the region of moral judgment: pure moral judgments arise from pure practical reason when everything “empirical” or experiential is purged from them. Maimon here is in effect testing that thesis, by inquiring whether such purity is a human possibility. The effort demanded here is, in Maimon’s view, that of a gold assayer, distinguishing impurities from the pure gold. Similarly, “a pure feeling for truth and virtue” arises only when we distinguish our interests and their attendant emotions from our acts of judgment, for example, separating a feeling of being aggrieved from other feelings and emotions, as well as from the shock connected to the injury suffered. Avoiding “sophistries of the heart,” in short, requires a careful analysis of 80. See Autobiography, chapter 19 (87). Writing about the “new Hasidim,” Maimon observes: “…with their false ideas about religion and virtue, they ground religion in the ideal of future rewards…Thus their actions follow from an impure source, namely, the principle of self-interest.”

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all emotions and passions, which, Maimon asserts, have “still not been sufficiently investigated.” His goal, therefore, is to reveal the heterogeneity of influences on our passions through a careful parsing of logical, psychological, and moral dimensions in play in our emotions. The “exact object of the investigation,” however, is the origin of moral good and evil: not what the will determines or fails to determine in accordance with moral law, but “what is in accordance with reason in general,” the good, and what is contrary to reason, evil. Here, “contrary to reason” represents an extreme rejection of reason, a summary striving against reason, rather than a mere lack of knowledge. In this respect, Maimon’s argument moves more in the terrain of Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, and its analysis of moral evil, than in the region of the second Critique or the Groundwork. The ensuing section of the essay is brief; Maimon restricts his remarks to comments on the task of discovering the origin of moral good and evil. The tendency, when raising this question, is to assign this origin to a discrete substance, whether to God or to some causal original agency. Instead, the issue calls for an investigation of the “moral nature of humanity.” For Maimon, these are not theological issues, but anthropological ones. They therefore involve “the idea of absolute freedom of the will,” rather than the idea of God: “God comes into play as little as the devil.” The moral good “in the deepest sense,” Maimon writes, is what renders someone virtuous and “worthy to be happy”; the moral good unites the idea of absolute freedom of the will with the ideal of necessity according laws of nature. Moral evil, conversely, involves the discord between human freedom and natural necessity, that is, when we extend our wills or the claims of natural necessity over our actions “beyond the limits of their use.” This problem is familiar especially from Kant’s later writings. As he explains in the Introduction to his Critique of Judgment, a great gulf separates the “supersensible” domain of reason and freedom from the realm of natural necessity. This gulf can only be spanned by a special act of aesthetic and teleological judgment, which “makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom.” 81 More narrowly, Maimon’s proposed analysis of “the moral nature of humanity” commits us to explaining why our power of desire, which 81. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Introduction, IX, 37 (AA 5:196).

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naturally inclines to the good, should just as easily choose evil, or fail to distinguish between an apparent good and something genuinely good in itself. Returning to the metaphor of the gold assay, this time by way of the Book of Job, Maimon sets his sights precisely on what needs to be purged from our wills to arrive at the good: foolishness and folly.82 Owing to the mutual influence of knowledge and will upon one another, the causes of conceptual and moral error intertwine. In a statement that anticipates Nie­ tzsche’s observations about the origin of notions of truth and goodness, Maimon notes that even “our theoretical errors are…practical.” The false can on occasion be as useful as the true. The origin of error and delusion can therefore be discovered in the same prejudices, passions, and inclinations that provoke moral error. “For what are inclinations and passions,” Maimon asks, but wanting “the error that suits you, instead of the truth that opposes you?” All conceptual errors, Maimon concludes, are “in respect of their origin and their actual existence” errors of the will. Human knowledge and human will reinforce one another to the detriment of both. On the other hand, even though “errors of the mind” are inevitable, they are not irremediable. To rid ourselves of them, we have to get to know them. And in getting to know them, human praxis will improve. Maimon divides his subsequent analysis into three stages: logical, psychological, and moral. However, his essay compasses only the first two. He begins with definitions. “Folly” (Thorheit) wills something as an end that can only be a means; “foolishness” (Narrheit) neglects means and grasps instantly for the end.83 Maimon suggests the following example: a miser is not a fool, but commits the folly of willing a means to an end as an end in itself — hoarding money for the sake of, well, hoarding money. In Maimon’s words, “he’d rather have the money than do anything with it.” From a logical point of view, folly represents a confusion of absolutes; both ends and means are equally objects of a will. In effect, then, acts of folly entail a logical contradiction: what is willed as a means to an end is also willed an end in itself. Foolishness, on the other hand, arises from an ambiguity in the word “will.” To will something, that is, to draw the judgment that it is good for 82. Job 28:1, 12, 20: “See! The silver has its mines; gold, places from which it is (later) purified. But where can wisdom be found: and whence does wisdom come?” 83. In modern German, Thorheit and Narrheit are nearly synonymous; see Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1854).

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someone, is, broadly construed, a wish, but more narrowly, a decision about the use of means to acquire it. Children wish, adults will. Or so it would seem. But, as Maimon notes, even adults tend to confuse willing with wishing or desiring.84 While acts of will concern means, wishing and desiring concern ends. The will is subsequently “cold,” calculating means to ends; but desiring “can escalate from a mere wish to a violent longing” that intensifies as the object of desire remains out of reach of any available means. The resulting affect is painful, which Maimon describes in a wonderful metaphor: “the subject is like a shore-bound sea, whose waves, after being driven ashore by the wind, crash down, broken.” The subject’s inner pain, then, rather than a lack of knowledge or prudence, creates the basis for all foolishness. The opposite of prudence isn’t being a fool, it’s being a naïf, since prudence results from experience. Nor is foolishness a lack of knowledge, but a failure of the will. As Maimon notes, “consider genuine so-called fools in a madhouse. Are they merely imprudent?” On the other hand, Maimon also notes that all human beings sin “more or less” against “the principle of sufficient reason,” that is, the notion that everything must have a reason or cause.85 Maimon admits that no one will deny this principle; they just won’t apply it, especially when it comes to their desires. His verdict: “All human beings are therefore more or less fools!” The final portion of the essay addresses the nature of the emotions — unavoidable, given their central role in “sophistries of the heart.” Thus far, Maimon has investigated the nature of sophistries in general; what they reveal about the origin of moral good and evil; and finally, the nature of human folly, and what it reveals about the interplay of knowledge and will. This final section returns, in one respect, to themes at the outset of the essay, concerning subjective influences that affect the power of desire, thereby influencing our moral judgments.86 In the discussion of folly that immediately precedes this section, Maimon observed the subjective effects of disordered judgments, in particular, how they intensify emotions that in turn stiffen the foolish person against reason. Now, in the final portion of 84. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III.1. 85. The principle of sufficient reason is especially associated with Leibniz; see Monadology, prop. 32, in Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. C. Gerhard (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923). 86. Again, the nomenclature is Kant’s; the “power of desire” [Begehrungsvermögen] compasses reason and freedom, and therewith the sphere of moral judgment.

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this essay, Maimon turns directly to an account of the emotions. Maimon divides his account into five parts: concerning emotions in general; concerning the “inertial force” of emotion; concerning the difference between animal and human emotion; concerning the origin of the emotions; and finally, concerning the classification of the emotions. In the first case, Maimon defines emotions as “heightened (pleasant or unpleasant) feelings” intensified by ideas arising from our cognitive faculties and associated with an “impatient striving” either to “intensify and maintain these feelings,” or be rid of them. By themselves, Maimon observes, ideas and concepts cannot affect feelings that result from an experience or external impression.87 But when augmented by the senses, these ideas can have powerful effects. For example, the pain one feels when a stone strikes them is the same whether it drops off a ledge or is deliberately thrown. On the other hand if someone is responsible for throwing the stone, the concept of the event comes to be armed by ideas of justice, and the unfortunate victim whose head stops the flight of the stone feels offended and angry: the more the concept of justice affects the emotion of anger, the more the anger at being struck intensifies, “making it seem as if an unjust pain were more pain than pain.” The second issue, the vis inertia of emotion, reads emotion through the lens of the laws of nature. Since bodies at rest remain at rest, and bodies in motion remain in motion, there is an inevitable torpor or resistance to a change of state that characterizes all beings. Similarly, human minds, once they start in motion, they can’t stop; or, unwilling to move, they resist any coercion from outside. Both states, Maimon observes, “betray an equal lack of self-determination of the will.” Minds and will at rest, remain at rest, and when in motion, remain in motion. This judgment has important moral implications. According to Maimon, the moral worth of the active individual, striving for perfection, and of the lazy individual, is at bottom the same. The reason: neither state involves what Maimon calls “self-activity.” On the other hand, were the lazy person to struggle to remain in a state of torpor, willfully resisting every compulsion to act, that person would possess moral worth as a consequence of their self-actualization (so to speak) as a profoundly lazy soul. For Maimon, then, it is not the object of 87. The distinction between ideas and concepts is Kantian in origin. While ideas are the products of reason, concepts are the work of the understanding. Concepts can be explained and demonstrated discursively; ideas cannot. See the Critique of Pure Reason, Book I, Sections 1–3.

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the activity that determines its moral worth; it is whether the state of being is self-willed, or determined, as it were, by nature. This argument is certainly curious, even for a de-frocked Kantian. But it follows from Maimon’s inclination, seen in earlier essays, to understand moral states in light of physical ones. Maimon’s interest in the emotional components of judgments, his concern with the modifications of the body, his (bleak) observations about medicine, his attempt to reconcile the organic with the inorganic (“Letters to Herr Peina”) are all part and parcel of this “moral-physical parallelism.” It is therefore fitting that the next brief section of this essay addresses the distinction between human and animal emotion. His emphasis falls on the distinction. There is a human inclination to impute or “transfer” to animals emotions they find first in themselves. Do animals fall in love, or suffer outrage? But even within the animal world, Maimon continues, there exists a great diversity of feeling, based upon the great diversity of biological organization. Feelings, then, have deep roots in the natural constitution of animals and of human beings. At the same time, it is precisely owing to matters of natural constitution that animal and human feeling differ. However, there are some individuals who won’t be convinced that an elephant and an oyster don’t share the way they experience feelings of hunger or their drive for sex. With that observation, Maimon turns to discuss the origin of the emotions. As different sorts of weaknesses of the mind, their cause is not accidental, like illness. Their cause lies in the essence of the human mind, and in the way its basic powers develop. In this respect, human emotions are innate to human beings (reinforcing the notion, above, concerning the difference between animal and human emotion based upon their natural organization). Specifically, their “formal cause” (here as elsewhere Maimon adopts the terminology of the Aristotelians) lies in the “higher” cognitive powers (reason and understanding), and their “efficient cause” in the “lower” ones (sensation and imagination); but their sustained efficacy lies in the will. That is to say, emotions reveal “a permanent conflict between the universal demands of the theoretical powers of knowledge (effective knowledge of the object) and the practical (will-determining) powers of knowledge in one and the same intellectual expression.” Namely, because the emotions are a sort of intellectual weakness for Maimon, their persistence reveals the limits of human knowledge to correct and perfect our wills. The dichotomy Maimon implies here between theory and practice is striking; for the majority of his career, Maimon had

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attempted to show that moral excellence was (following Maimonides) but a propaedeutic for intellectual perfection. Here, Maimon seems to admit that the harmony between theoretical and practical realms is uneasy at best. The emotions, he writes, “contain the coarsest misunderstandings, and the strangest deceptions.” They therefore must be classified, as the final portion of the essay states, in light of their proximity to reason. He concludes: “For the intention of the entire investigation is to show how these mental weaknesses which are peculiar to human beings, arise… from the rational nature peculiar to them.” Emotions are, in short, not physiological phenomena (even though they register in bodily ways); they are, as it were, problematic states of mind. Thus, striving for freedom of will and intellect, we are always recalled to our emotional frailties, about which Maimon warns us, here and elsewhere, so that we might find ways of transcending them: vitam impendere vero.

Maimon’s Legacy Y_Z In the end, Maimon succumbed to the same dichotomies that, in his view, vexed Kantian philosophy: between intellect and will, reason and nature, duty and inclination. His final essays make clear that the elements of Kantian philosophy simply do not sum. In this respect, and in spite of his continual return to Kant’s terminology and conceptual framework, Maimon was perhaps genuinely at home, if he was at home anywhere, only within the ambit of Maimonides’ “radical Aristotelianism” and the striving to intellectual perfection upon which it insists. It is then a bit ironic that Maimon could not find a way to satisfy the abstemious demand for “purity” on the intellectual and moral planes which the Kantian system requires except by departing Kant for Maimonides. In his final essays, Maimon’s Maimonideanism is less on display than his Kantianism, but only in so far as these essays record Maimon’s surrender to the problems that beset Kant’s thought. Indeed, his abandonment of Kant comes to a head in Maimon’s concessions to the inevitable effect of the body and the modifications to which it is subject — emotions and passionate inclinations — that can only be thwarted by acts of a “self-willing” will. What, then, of Maimon’s legacy, especially when in the end he abandons his life-long project to clarify and to some degree repair Kantian philosophy? Until quite recently, his final essays were barely studied, and have remained in the shadow cast by his other critical wrtitings. One might say the same about his entire career, which until recently has been largely 49

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ignored. Always the outsider in life, in death Maimon was easily overshadowed by the towering figures of German Idealism — Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. As a result, Maimon’s role in shaping the contours of German Idealism and its assimilation of Kantian ideas has been largely overlooked until quite recently.88 Here however is Fichte’s view of the matter, in a letter to Reinhold of 1795: My respect for Maimon’s talents knows no bounds. I firmly believe that he has completely overturned the entire Kantian philosophy as it has been understood by everyone until now, including you, and I am prepared to prove it. No one noticed what he had done; they had looked down on him from their heights. I believe that future centuries will mock us bitterly.89 The proof Fichte promises was his own Wissenschaftslehre, the first sentence of which attests to Maimon’s inspiration of Fichte’s project. “Our task,” Fichte writes, “is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. This can be neither proved nor defined, if it is to be an absolutely primary principle.”90 While Fichte does not name Maimon, his task was urged decisively by his confrontation with Maimon’s scepticism about the foundations of the Kantian critical philosophy.91 At the same time, it is precisely this task that Maimon abandons in his last years, intimations of which we catch in his remarks to Fichte on the need for systematicity in philosophy. Still, in so far as German Idealism is inspired by an attempt to come to terms with the implications of Kantian philosophy, its methods, conclusions, and shortcomings, Maimon’s critiques of Kant proved influential. Although the lines of transmission are blurry, Fichte seems to be the point of relay between Maimon and the later titans of German Idealism. 88. Among recent studies are Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 89. Fichte, Gesamtausgabe III/2:282. This passage is taken from Frederick Beiser’s essay, “Maimon and Fichte,” in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic, ed. Gideon Freudenthal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003). 90. Fichte: The Science of Knowing: J.G. Fichte’s Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Walter E. Wright (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005). 91. See Beiser, supra cit.

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In addition to Maimon’s provocative critiques of Kant, of particular issue are the uses to which Fichte and others put the work of Spinoza, the other critical influence upon Maimon’s thought. Their understanding of Spinoza’s celebrated pantheism, a cause célèbre — or infâme — during the end of the eighteenth century, bears the indelible stamp of Maimon’s influence, given its affinity to Hasidic and Kabbalistic notions of “acosmism” and “self-annihilation,” as well as divine limitation or tzimtzum.92 In fact, the Idealists’ attempt to weave together Kantian and Spinozistic thought follows Maimon, who was perhaps the first, though certainly not the last, to attempt such a synthesis. Maimon is an indispensable thinker, then, precisely for dwelling at the intersection of various worlds: pre-modern and modern, Jewish and German, philosophical and mystical. To again cite Gideon Freudenthal, Maimon was “a philosopher between two cultures,” whose chosen mode of philosophizing — intertextual commentary — was foreign to his Enlightenment readers, while his subject matter challenged Jewish intellectual culture and tradition. Maimon’s ambiguous status among German philosophers at the close of the eighteenth century may explain the relative neglect (pace Fichte) into which he fell. Overwhelmed in stature by the likes of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Maimon appears in the history of philosophy as a transitional figure who lays the groundwork for a more profound and systematic philosophical movement. Yet, his outsider status gained him a reputation, after his death, among other budding eastern European Jewish literary and political radicals like Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg (1795–1846), Moshe Lieb Lillienblum (1843–1910), and Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (née Mikhah Yosef Ben-Gurion, 1865–1921), who were all early reformers and Zionists. 92. Yitzhak Melamed (for one) has argued persuasively for Maimon’s sub rosa influence on their appropriation of Spinoza. See Melamed, “‘Let the Law Cut through the Mountain’: Salomon Maimon, Moses Mendelssohn, and Mme. Truth,” in Höre die Wahrheit, wer sie auch spricht, ed. Lukas Muehlethaler. Schriften des Jüdishen Museums Berlin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 70–76. To see this influence on Fichte’s thought, compare the following passages from Maimon and from Fichte: “The principle of self-annihilation that [the rabbis] taught is, understood correctly, no different than the foundation of self-activity” (Autobiography, 107/GW, 257–59); “As long as the individual desires to be, God does not come to him, for no man can become God” (Anweisung zum seligen Leben, Leipzig, 1910:128). The affinity between these two passages is striking.

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Guenzberg deliberately modeled his autobiography, Avi’ezer (1864), on Maimon’s Autobiography and Rousseau’s Confessions. Lillienblum, an early Zionist, used not only Rousseau’s and Maimon’s autobiographies to shape his own (Hattot Ne’urim, “Sins of Youth,” 1876), but Guenzberg’s as well. Berdichevsky, for his part, integrated passages from Maimon’s autobiography into his own, following the examples of Guenzberg and Lillienblum. But Berdichevsky went further and used Maimon’s story as a basis for the character Mikha’el in his novel Mahanayim [“Two Camps”]. In a passage that evokes Maimon’s own reflections about traveling to Berlin, he writes: Why does he not go to Germany?...The people there are more cultivated and knowledgeable. It was there that Mendelssohn’s star arose and it was there that his [Mikha’el’s] own countryman, Salomon Maimon arrived. For Mikha’el had already read the autobiography of this great wanderer. He felt closer to Maimon than he did to Mendelssohn. Finally, the theoretician of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha‘am, mentions in a letter to Simon Bernfeld his special pleasure in the way Bernfeld characterized Maimon in his book on the Mendelssohn period in Berlin (Dor Tahapukot, 1896–1898) [“A Generation of Upheaval”]: I received Dor Tahapukot which I read with much pleasure. I was positively happy you stood up for Salomon Maimon. Many years ago I read his autobiography, and it made a profound impression, and my heart went out to this unfortunate man, who lost his way through no fault of his own. The wayward son managed to inspire others to find their way.93 Taking up these same themes in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt appeals to Maimon as her paradigmatic “conscious pariah”: However slender the basis out of which the concept [of the pariah] was created…it has nonetheless loomed larger in the thinking of assimilated Jews than might be inferred from standard Jewish histories. 93. For a more complete account of these early Zionist figures and their relationship with Maimon vis-à-vis autobiographical writing, see Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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It has endured from Salomon Maimon in the eighteenth century to Franz Kafka in the early twentieth.94 Chaim Potok fell under the sway of Maimon’s status as pariah as well. In The Chosen, Potok uses Maimon as an inspiration for another troubling and compelling Hasidic character, Danny Saunders, whose resemblance to Maimon is noted by another character, David Malter. Interestingly, Maimon was also the subject of Potok’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, “The Rationalism and Skepticism of Salomon Maimon” (1965). In the precinct of philosophy, Maimon influenced both Leo Strauss and Walter Benjamin. Strauss gleaned from Maimon the basic perspective in light of which he read Maimonides. Thus, referring to Maimonides’ claim at the beginning of the Guide that his intention is “to offer nothing other than the science of the Law,” Strauss comments: It is no doubt with a view to this passage that in his autobiography, Salomon Maimon has entitled the first chapter of his review of the Guide as follows: “More Nebuchim, its plan, goal and method is theologia politica.” Maimon renders the above-mentioned passage from the Introduction to the Guide in the following words: the Guide “is solely aimed…to lay the foundation for the science of lawgiving (the wisdom of the law).95 Like Strauss, Walter Benjamin also turned to Maimon, in this case to explain the relationship between the multiplicity of ideas and the unity of truth by way of a biblical legend Benjamin acquired from reading Maimon’s Autobiography. In an early draft of the Introduction to his Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin writes, concerning ideas: …the ideas are however of a peculiar nature, which may be implied initially by way of a legend. It concerns the stones that cover the Sinai. These, as Salomon Maimon noted, have impressed upon them the pattern of a leaf (tree) whose special nature consists in the fact that it 94. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Conscious Pariah: A Hidden Tradition.” Jewish Social Studies 6 (1944): 98–117. 95. Leo Strauss, “The Place of the Doctrine of Providence According to Maimonides,” in Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings, 326n34; Guide I.46; Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971).

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reproduces itself immediately on every single piece of stone that has broken off from a stone block, and this infinitely.96 Finally, Maimon’s critique of Hasidism came to the attention of Gershom Scholem, who deemed Maimon’s entire approach to Judaism “unfruitful.” 97 All of these are, in one way or another, Maimon’s companions in apiqorsut. There is, though, another direction, less heretical, that Maimon inspires. In George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, the titular character accidentally discovers a copy of Maimon’s Autobiography in a London bookstall: One of the shop windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture….That the mixture was judicious was apparent from Deronda’s finding in it something that he wanted — namely, that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon….98 A fortuitous discovery, as it turns out: it inspires Daniel’s gradual return to his ancestral faith. Of course, Maimon’s similar discovery of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed led him in a rather different direction: away from Judaism, smack into the arms of philosophy. These two rather different outcomes illustrate well the dichotomies and temptations of Maimon’s own life. At home in a pre-modern conceptual world, both Jewish and Aristotelian, he nonetheless dedicated himself to the study of that world’s modern antagonists. Finding in his youthful reading of Maimonides the cave out of which one emerges into the light of true philosophy, he continually returns, critiquing his contemporaries in the ancient light cast by the Guide of the Perplexed. Maimon, in short, is an indispensable thinker precisely because of the depth of intellect and passion with which he lived out fundamental alternatives challenging our search for the best way of life: between “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” the shtetl and the city, “ancients” and “moderns” — and in this manner, 96. Walter Benjamin, first draft of the Introduction to The Origins of German Tragic Drama (Gesammelte Schriften I.-3, Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1991), 213–14. 97. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971). 98. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 323.

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displayed the fundamental alternatives confronting the thinker. To borrow a phrase from Leo Strauss, we find in Salomon Maimon the drama of progress or return.99

99. Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 87–136.

PART II: THE LAST ESSAYS

Notes on the Translation Y_Z Salomon Maimon’s German is, on occasion, unique. He acquired German only after Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish; it was only during his time at the Gymnasium Christianeum, at the age of twenty-six, that he undertook a systematic study of German. In cadence and, at times, in grammatical structure, as well as in his periodic eccentric spellings, Maimon’s German preserves a Yiddish tone. Another feature of Maimon’s prose is his prolific use of italics throughout his essays. I have attempted to preserve as much of his tone as possible, as well as his italicizations. In spite of his (at times) idiosyncratic German, Maimon’s nomenclature remains by and large Kantian, even in his treatments of Maimonides. When rendering this Kantian terminology, I have generally followed Mary Gregor’s translations of key terms in Kant’s moral thought, and Werner Pluhar’s translations of Kant’s terminology at work in the Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment. However, I believe that Maimon’s last essays depart on occasion from strict Kantian usages. Below are some key words that appear in Maimon’s essays, and brief explanations for my choices: Erkenntniß: cognition, knowledge. While “cognition” accords with standard English translations of Kant, I have reserved “cognition” for those instances where Maimon is treating a technical epistemological act. Otherwise, I have rendered the word more generally, as “knowledge,” 59

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which in the context of these essays sounds less clumsy. Geist: spirit, intellect, mind. I have in the main chosen to render this word “intellect” rather than “spirit” given Maimon’s abstemious commitment to intellectual perfection. Größe: greatness, magnitude, size. When Maimon is writing about human qualities, I have rendered the word “greatness”; when he is writing about mathematics, I have used either “size” or “magnitude,” depending on the context, and in order to avoid repetition of the word. Grund: ground, foundation, reason, cause. In general, I have rendered the word “ground,” in order to echo Maimon’s concern in establishing necessary and foundational truths from which to derive philosophical conclusions Kraft: power, force. In order to distinguish Kraft from Vermögen (see below), I have translated Kraft mainly as “force.” Mann, Mensch: man. While Maimon intends these terms to embrace all human beings, I have chosen to render them “individual” or “human being,” depending upon the context. Trieb: drive. This is an important term for Maimon and, later, for Fichte and others. Maimon draws it from Spinoza’s concept of conatus. Vorstellung: idea, representation, presentation. In traditional translations of Kant, the word is typically rendered “representation”; Werner Pluhar renders it “presentation.” In his final essays, Maimon seems to intend idea; where there is a deviation from this usage, the German word will be included. Vermögen: power, faculty, capacity. Pluhar renders it “power,” as a way of animating the static picture offered by “faculty psychology,” rather than by “capacity” or “faculty.” I follow him here. Versuch: essay, attempt, inquiry. By translating this word “attempt,” I am aiming to echo Montaigne’s essai, the flavor of which captures the spirit of Maimon’s Versuchen. zweckmäßig: purposive, intentional. This term is especially familiar to readers of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The customary translation, in the context of Kant’s thought, is “purposive” (matching Zweckmäßigkeit, or purposiveness). Kant wishes to emphasize the issue of ends, Zwecken, as in his characterization of aesthetic judgments as Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck, or “purposiveness without purpose.” Whenever possible, I have retained this Kantian usage; at times, however, I have changed it to the more conventional usage, “intentional.”

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When I have judged it useful or necessary, I have included the German word Maimon uses in brackets. When Maimon includes a Latin term (which he does, periodically, to link his thought to Scholastic usage) I have put the term in parentheses. Also, Maimon’s infrequent footnotes are placed in brackets. All other footnotes are numbered consecutively across the volume. Finally, I have introduced the pagination of the essays following Maimon’s Gesammelte Werke (8 Volumes), edited by Valerio Verra (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965–1976), as well as from the journals in which they first appeared. The essays in this volume can all be found in GW VII.

On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality 100 Y_Z Introduction

[165/452] The Kantian doctrine of virtue is faulty in two respects. First, the word virtue is taken in a completely different sense than it actually has in language, and doctrine of virtue is confused with doctrine of duty. Virtue, in a wider sense, is only perfection, and in a stricter sense, perfection of the will, which consists in its freedom (a self-determination of the subject) of which the fulfillment of duty is a mere consequence.101 [166/453] No duty (regardless of its categorical imperative) can be fulfilled without acquiring freedom of the will. This acquired freedom (for which individuals have the capacity) is now virtue, to which the fulfillment of duty as such adds nothing. Second, duty (being bound by certain determinations of the will) is sought as a factum of the common human understanding, and then as the reason for explaining the possibility of such a fact. However, since the common human understanding is mistaken, and what is originally required of it as a means to an end (correctness in action as a means to preserving the advantages of society) can be taken for something that is required in and of itself, regardless of any purpose (as it is, e.g., in 100. “Über die ersten Gründe der Moral” was first published in Philosophisches Journal, vol. 5 (1798), 165–90 (GW VII: 452–77). 101. [Kant even explains virtue as a fitness for all ends.] 63

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the case of someone who hoards money and honor), this appeal to the common human understanding is a very regrettable thing. The categorical imperative is therefore only categorical in so far as the rational law is not conditioned by an accidental determination of the subject and the object of the will. But this law is, nevertheless, merely hypothetical in respect of the assumed fact that is problematic in itself (that reason is not only a causa formalis, but also a causa efficiens of the determination of the will, that it does not only contain a cause that determines, [167/454] but rather actually determines the will); and this uncompromising ought is finally only a consequence of a hypothetical proposition: if the specified fact is true, and not based upon a deception, so ought one, etc. Roughly speaking, as it is commonly expressed: this one or that one ought to be wealthy, that is, if what people say about him is true, he ought, etc. — The most important thing, then, by which this law is practical not only in the sense that it refers to the will, but also because it actually determines it, is missing from it; and the phrases (one must be capable, since one ought, and the like) by which one nevertheless stubbornly wants to obtain what he cannot prove, still serve no purpose. My method, the first to establish the causes of morality, is this: I posit an unambiguous fact, that the individual (as well as every natural being in general) is determined to reach its perfection (that is, making what is possible in it actual), and has an innate drive toward this. Now if there were no drives in the individual other than animal ones (inclinations to pleasant sensuous feelings), one would not first need a moral law that dictates the satisfaction of these natural drives; the laws of nature [168/455] alone would already suffice for this. However, among the natural aptitudes of individuals there is one (that can be called an aptitude [Anlage] in so far as it is grounded in an original capacity of human nature, and is not at first acquired, but in so far as its expression is merely possible at the outset, but not yet actual, it is a power [Vermögen]; but in so far as a striving is found in the subject to make actual what is possible through self-actualization, it is a force) by which the individual distinguishes itself among all natural beings in a most curious way, and which constitutes the sublimity of his nature, namely, a drive to determine the will against all sensuous drives and inclinations. That the individual is not immediately aware of this drive is therefore due to the fact that the individual cannot express its effect [Wirkung] until the opposite drive has expressed its own (which it is supposed to cancel by its effect).

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But a drive is only the inner tendency to exercise a force with a pleasant feeling accompanying it. The inner tendency to exercise a force in itself cannot be immediately perceived, since it is neither an object nor an objective condition of the subject, but rather merely a tendency to produce it without being conscious of it. [169/456] Its existence in the subject can therefore only be known by its consequences (the state of the subject determined by it). Now this drive, whose effect consists merely in canceling the effect of another drive, in fact has an unpleasant feeling as an immediate consequence. But in the same way, it is a pleasant feeling through its own satisfaction. It therefore has everything necessary to be a drive, which, like every other drive, must be satisfied. But this must (physical necessity) refers only to every drive in itself; however, it does not determine anything in the case of a collision (as is consistently the case), since it is opposed by an equal must. The subject’s accidental circumstances must therefore decide here, and not only determine what must be in general, but what must be in each given case. However, if it can be shown that in the event of a collision (which always takes place) between a given drive [Trieb] and a rational drive that is opposed to every drive, the weight of the latter is always acknowledged, since if it could not otherwise take place, the physical necessity will still remain as it was. But it will arise from a new moral necessity, an ought. [170/457] Now, the fact that I am basing this on is not a judgment of the common human understanding (which in many cases is quite suspect), but rather the inner consciousness of a drive, which is recognizable through its consequences, and therefore must be satisfied like any other drive, and, after insight into the nature of this drive, should be satisfied in all cases.102 According to me (just as according to the Stoics), there is only a single virtue: self-control, or the power acquired to determine the will against all sensuous drives and inclinations. But since, if it can be exercised without exception, this virtue will cancel itself (for if the individual should resist all inclinations, he must also resist those that are indispensable to his actions, and consequently to the exercise of virtue); and if it should be left to pure arbitrariness to determine 102. [This drive is not the one Reinhold establishes as unselfish. According to me, every drive is selfish and unselfish in the same way: since, according to my account, no drive precedes the idea of a pleasant feeling, and the pleasant feeling accompanies every drive in general.]

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[171/458] in which case virtue, and in which case the opposite inclination should be exercised, there would be no criterion whatsoever whereby one could recognize that virtue will be in general exercised; so there must necessarily be a rational rule or a rational law whereby this can be determined. The concept of duty in general (a compulsion to determine the will against the inclinations), but not of specific duties, follows from the concept of virtue, as we have posited it. According to me, this does not follow from virtue itself, but rather from rational laws, which are conceived as a condition for the possible uses of virtue. Whoever, e.g., communicates his assets to someone else to whom he owes nothing exercises a virtue (taming his greed) just like the one who pays his debt, only that for the former no duty is fulfilled, but for the latter a duty is fulfilled. The fulfillment of duty does not add anything to the virtue, but is merely a consequence of the law that is conceived as a condition for the possible uses of virtue. The doctrine of duty must therefore be distinguished from the doctrine of virtue, and follow from it. [172/459] According to this way of treating morality, all the different moral principles that have been posited so far are precisely connected with one another. The concept of virtue and self-control is Stoic; and since this is a perfection of the will, the doctrine of virtue agrees with the doctrine of perfection (Wolff ’s morality), as well as with the doctrine of happiness (namely, in so far as happiness is not determined by an accident, but rather by a genuine causality of the subject). However, the doctrine of duty, just like the Kantian doctrine of virtue, is derived from a rational law. But before I approach the work itself, I must first note something in general about the bias of the new philosophy. There is a certain expression in language, which, with the progress of human knowledge, has become quite ambiguous (since the perfection of language does not follow the same steps as the perfection of knowledge); and, by considering but only a few meanings, it has happened that one is constantly accustomed to connecting the idea of perfection with certain expressions, just as one connects the idea of its lack with others. Thus, e.g., the epithet holy man, receives the highest praise, conversely, the word atheist has become the greatest insult; where praise or blame can be given to these expressions only in a very restricted sense. This can have no other result than dum stulti vitant vitia, etc.103 It is the same in philosophy 103. The complete passage is: “Dum vitant stulti vitia, in contraria currunt”

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with the expressions, pure, a priori, and empirical. It is undeniable that critical philosophy has specified a more precise meaning for these expressions than has been the case so far, but has only specified the extremes, where the first expression signifies the highest requisite of human knowledge, but the last signifies the lowest rung. But there has been no consideration of the middle rung, despite there being very important kinds of knowledge standing on this middle rung! Not only the actual doctrine of nature, but even the metaphysics of nature posits ideas that are in the strict sense empirical: and the a priori of mathematics is completely different from the a priori of transcendental philosophy. Should the Horatian saying also be true of some new philosophers, who, out of a panicky fear of the empirical become biased and want to force entire sciences into the narrow circle [174/461] of a priori ideas? As far as I am concerned, I recognize the value of pure a priori knowledge, and demand it, as far as the nature of the matter allows. But I also think that where it is not enough to completely determine the object to be treated, it is better to relax this severe demand rather than propose something incomplete. The matter must be attacked from more sides! It is particularly advisable in respect of morality, where the intention is not simply to satisfy our thirst for knowledge, but rather to improve us. In the present treatise I have observed all possible rigor required for the foundation of a science. But I see myself also forced to assume certain facts, which are not grounded in pure reason, but rather in general observations of human nature. For reason is itself only an observed fact of human nature! Here, I do nothing more than what Kant did in his Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, where he similarly posited generally observed empirical facts, but proceeded with the greatest rigor. So, to work! [175/462] A drive [Trieb] is the perception by the inner sense of the exercise of a power accompanied by a pleasant feeling. A desire [Begierde] is a drive, caused by the idea of a pleasant feeling, to bring about this feeling. The former drive is inborn; the latter is acquired. Remark: The immediate object of the power of desire is the state of the subject determined by a pleasant feeling, which pleasant feeling can be caused as much by external objects as by the activity of the subject itself. In the first case, the objects [Objekte] are the immediate object [Gegenstand] (“When fools try to avoid errors, they run into the opposite”). Horace, Satires, Book I.2, line 24.

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of the power of desire. A driving force [Triebfeder] is the idea of a pleasurable feeling contained in the desire.104 [176/463] Free choice [Willkür] is the power to choose between two contrary (contraria, opposite) determinations of the power of desire, that is, to decide on the one to the exclusion of the other. Will [Wille] is the decision of freedom of choice that has already been enacted. Wishing therefore presupposes choosing. Rational will is that which is determined by a previously rational decision (according to knowledge of the relations of things as means to ends). A good will is one whose end is good. Good, in respect of a subject in general, is the actualization [Wirklich­ werden] of what has a power (a ground of possibility) and a tendency (a ground of actuality). But in respect of a subject that is conscious of its inner state, the former is the indirect good of the inner state itself thereby determined, but as object of the power of desire, is the immediate good. An absolutely good will is one whose end is the highest good (summum bonum) [177/464], to which all other ends are subordinate. Negative and relative freedom is an immediately intelligible power of the subject to determine the will (by a greater opposing motive) against every given external (grounded in the object) motive. Positive and absolute freedom is an indirectly intelligible (by means of the consequences) power of the subject to determine the will against every external motive, which can be given by an inner motive opposed to an external motive (grounded in the kind of action of the subject), and is itself opposed to a greater motive.105 104. [In the following, I will use motive instead of motive force. Driving force is distinguished from determining ground as causa finalis is from causa formalis. The former is the answer to the question: why? The latter however is the answer to the question: how?] 105. [If we use reason, and not merely inner perception [Wahrnehmung], here we have the exact reverse, namely, negative and relative freedom is initially possible under a presupposition of absolute and positive freedom. For since the former consists in the inner consciousness of the subject that the given motive that actually determines the will is not the greatest possible motive, but instead there can always be a greater motive contrary to it; then in the event there is a greater motive, and that the subject recognizes it, the determination of the will by the lesser motive would be contrary to the proposition of sufficient reason. And in the event that there is no greater motive, or that the subject did not recognize it

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Theorem

[178/465] When an external motive is given, then either this or a contrary inner motive alone must determine the will; and there can be no determination of the will from composite motives. Proof: Composite forces are either composed of agreement or of [179/466] disagreement, or of both simultaneously. The first occurs, e.g., when two moving forces (they may be similar or dissimilar) act at the same time on the same body, in the same direction. The second occurs when they act in opposite directions, and then the action is either something positive (=the surplus of a force, when it is greater than another), or = zero (when both are the same). The third occurs when they are in accord in part and in part opposed (when the direction of the lines intersect). In this, just as in the first case, where the effect = zero, the subject (the moving body) is still able to be conceived under this determination. Composition of forces therefore has objective reality in all these cases. Here, though, the case is completely different. The inner motive (as a force) is directly opposed to the external motive. No harmonious composition can then occur, so that the effect (determination of the will) should be something positive, as in the first and third cases. But since they are the same, because the inner motive (as a force) can do nothing more than abolish the effect of the external motive (although as a pure power, as will be shown, it is [180/467] greater than this, no composition of opposites (as in the second case) can occur, so that the effect should be something positive. The effect however cannot = zero, since then it would not give any possible determination of the will, and consequently, no will. This zero would then not mean (as is usual with equal opposing forces) a nihil privatum as a greater motive (which would be as if there were none), the determination according to the given motive would be necessary. In both cases, that freedom could not occur. There must therefore be an inner perception (although not always clearly connected with consciousness) of absolute and positive freedom (to determine the will against all motives in general), and only this makes the idea of relative and negative freedom possible through the actual determination of the subject. It is in fact always determined by the greatest motive given, according to the principle of sufficient reason. But it is nevertheless internally conscious of a motive that can be greater than any given motive, and that this given motive is therefore not the greatest possible motive. Even so, the axiom, “any given line can be extended to infinity,” is conceivable only from the fact that space is represented as an infinite magnitude.]

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(canceling the consequences) but rather a nihil negativum (canceling the subject), through which will would be in general impossible. It must therefore be necessary, under the assumption of a given external motive, that either this motive or the same opposite inner motive alone determines the will, if will is at all possible. Which was demonstrated. Theorem

The inner motive (according to what it can be and not according to what it actually is in a given case) is stronger than any external motive that can be given, and should therefore determine the will in each given case. Proof: The external motive always refers positively to a given object [181/468] that is wanted. The inner motive however initially refers negatively to an object in general. It is therefore, as it were, a higher potency than the former. Second, the inner motive refers positively to the self-determination for the subject, by which the will is not just determined mechanically (where the greater force abolishes the effect of the lesser, but even loses just as much due to the counteraction and continues its activity with the rest), but rather dynamically (where the greater force is increased by canceling the effect of the lesser and its effect is therefore able to continue with increased strength at future opportunities). The inner motive is therefore in this respect stronger than any external motive that can be given. Which was the first. But in that case the inner motive must not always determine the will. On the contrary, accidental circumstances (lack of insight, habit, and the like) can determine the subject. Reason however, which considers things objectively according to their nature in separation from all accidental circumstances of the subject, categorically commands that among all these circumstances the inner motive should determine the will. Which is the second. Theorem

[182/469] The determination of the will from inner motives is only knowable as a determination according to a rule (objectively). Proof: The consequences of the will (actions) that can be determined by an inner motive are equal to the consequences of the will that can be determined by external motives. Therefore, the determination of the will from the inner motive cannot be known merely from the consequences. If then this determination of the will should not merely be thought (since it does not entail a contradiction) but rather be objectively known, this

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cannot happen unless the will is determined in accordance with (not from) a rule. For since the rule is universal (in all cases), the consequences of the opposing determinations of the will cannot always agree, so there will have to be cases in which these consequences are contrary to each other, and from this, the determination of the will according to the inner motive can be known. Theorem

The rule according to which the determination of the will from an inner motive is knowable, [183/470] must, as unalterable, be thought to be necessary and universally valid. Proof: Since the rule would be intentional and therefore changeable, the subject itself could alter the rule; and then it remains (as without any rule at all) ambiguous, whether even this alteration occurs from an inner or an external motive. The determination of the will from inner motives would therefore not be able to be represented. The rule must therefore be thought to be unalterable, necessary, and universally valid. Theorem

If a rule (by which a determination of the will from an internal motive can be known) can be thought to be unalterable, necessary and universally valid, it must be grounded in the lawfulness [Gesetzmäßigkeit] of its form. Proof: For since the internal motive does not refer to any particular, but only negatively, to an object in general, the rule by which this internal motive is able to be represented cannot refer to anything particular, but only to an object in general. It must therefore [184/471] be grounded in the lawfulness of its form in reference to an object in general. In this way, I believe that we have sufficiently met with all the demands of the ultimate grounds for a morality. In the first place, the drive to absolute freedom (the ability of the will to be determined by the internal motive) is posited as a fact of consciousness, which makes the subject’s unrelenting practical demands on itself understandable. The first theorem demonstrates purity, the second, absolute predominance, the third, the possible representation. In my view, the moral law is: “Humanity! Be free, since you have a drive for freedom.” — Particular moral duties, however, are not derived from this, but from the law that is conceived as a condition for the possible representation of the former.

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The only thing left to do is to show the interest of morality, by showing how virtue is connected with perfection and happiness (in so far as they are able to be determined by the self-activity of the subject) and how these are consequences of virtue. Theorem

[185/472] Virtue, which consists in acquiring freedom of the will, is the highest perfection of humanity. Proof: One perfection can be called higher than another in three ways. First, when the former one presupposes the latter one in reality. So, for example, in this sense animal life is a higher perfection than simply organized life, since animal life, if it is to be at all, presupposes organized existence. Second, when the former constitutes what is essential in the latter, making them what they are. Thus, in the example given, animal life, although it presupposes organization in general, is nevertheless the one that in turn determines organization in general as animal organization in the first place. Third, when the former requires a greater effort and application of forces than the latter. Virtue, as perfection, presupposes the reality of all other perfections. For it should counteract (innate or acquired) drives and inclinations. Counteraction however presupposes action. Virtue [186/473] therefore can express its proper effectiveness only to the degree to which it shows itself to be effective. Virtue constitutes what is essential to all other perfections. Without freedom, none of them can be held to be a human perfection, and it is a perfection only in so far as freedom can be found in it. Thus, for example, the pure receptivity of the sensible power of cognition possesses the lowest degree of perfection, because receiving impressions permits almost no freedom. The reproductive power of imagination, however, since it is capable of various associations, and therefore is capable of more freedom in its exercise, has a greater degree of perfection. The productive or poetic power of imagination, which purposefully chooses and orders and connects ideas not as they happen to be received, but rather according to an (inner) principle, expresses a greater degree of freedom and consequently of perfection. The understanding, which associates ideas in a unity of consciousness according to their objective relations with each other, not according to some merely subjective principle (a purposive effect on feeling), and counteracts the way the power of imagination [187/474] associates them, expresses a still higher degree of freedom and perfection.

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Finally, reason, which is placed above all sensible conditions and rises to the unconditional, expresses the highest degree of freedom and perfection among all cognitive powers; and so it is with all other perfections. They are found to be perfections only in so far as freedom is found in them. Freedom is therefore not only an essential perfection of the individual itself, but it also constitutes the essence of the individual’s other perfections, where from animal perfections they become human perfections. Third, it is also evident that since the drive for absolute freedom counteracts all other drives, satisfying it requires the greatest exertion of force: in this respect, therefore, it is the highest human perfection. Theorem

If a force of a being endowed with consciousness of its inner state is increased by its exercise, a satisfaction arises. [188/475] By contrast, if it is diminished by its exercise, pain. This proposition is merely hypothetical, in so far as the phenomenon can be explained in light of a feeling associated with the exercise of a force. Theorem

A force is increased in itself by its exercise, and can only be diminished by an exercise of a force opposed to it. Proof: A force that is not constantly renewed, but once it is applied, remains unchanged according to a general law of nature, while the entire effect remains unchanged, and the effect itself continues without ceasing (as, for example, a thrown body, if separated from the effect of heaviness, friction, etc.), would always move with the same force in the same direction that was communicated to it. A force that is always renewed produces an ever-increasing effect, or is itself ever-increasing. For the degree of the effect in the first moment lasts into the second moment, in which the renewed force still adds just as much, etc. (as is the case with gravity). [189/476] Therefore, no force can in itself be decreased by its exercise, but either remains unchanged (if the force is only expressed once), or is always increased (if it is always applied anew). It can therefore only be decreased by the effect of a force opposed to it. Theorem

Virtue affords the purest, most enduring and ever-increasing happiness. Proof: Virtue, as an exercise of a force, or a satisfaction of a drive, is

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connected with a pleasurable feeling in general. This feeling however cannot be connected to any other feeling that arises from the satisfaction of another drive, because it is excluded by the exercise of virtue. This feeling of pleasure accompanying virtue is therefore the purest. Virtue is (in its exercise) an ever-renewed force, so it cannot be diminished by its exercise, but rather must always be increased. There is [190/477] no impediment or decrease of the effect through the effect of an opposing force, since its effect consists only in the suppression of the effect of the opposing force. The pleasurable feeling or happiness accompanying it is therefore always enduring and always growing.

The Great Personage106 Y_Z [244/481] There is no higher nor more honorable title for an individual than the title “a great personage.” Some seek to worm their way to it more than to deserve it; others seek to deserve it, but fruitlessly; still others do not strive for it, and renounce all claim to it. This is explained by the following. The first appreciates the character of a great personage not as end in itself, but values it only as a means to any end, in which case the appearance serves as well as the thing itself. The second take the wrong path, where they likely find something, only not what they were genuinely searching for (like looking for gold and finding Prussian blue): they become great scholars, statesmen, generals, etc.; however, they can never become great personages on this path. The third, finally, greatly mistrusting themselves, and out of ignorance of what they could [245/482] do by their powers if they only wished to, despair of getting there. All however lack a clear conception of the character of a great personage. — Establishing this concept is no insignificant undertaking. The following essay is for this purpose. As it turns out, the aspiration to 106. “Der große Mann” was first published in Neue Berlinische Monatsschrift, vol. 2 (1799): 244–83 (GW VII: 481–520). The title of this essay could be translated variously as “The Great Individual” or “The Great Man”; Gideon Freudenthal translates it, “The Great Personality,” which is nearer Maimon’s meaning. I have chosen to render Mann as personage here in order to connote a status akin to Aristotelian megalopsychia. 75

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become a great personage is not just a tickle of vanity (as is commonly held), but in a certain respect is the condition for the possible fulfillment of all duties, and consequently of duty itself. To begin, I will draw from some metaphysics and terminology. A power [Vermögen] is the ground of possibility; force [Kraft], a ground of the reality [Wirklichkeit] of what comes to be effected. The former (the causa formalis) is determined merely by the kind of effect, or the law whereby the effect occurs. The latter is the exercise of the legislating [gesetzte] power (the causa efficiens). The idea of ends (as the causa finalis) still takes place in the power of desire [Begehrungsvermögen]. The choice between conflicting, and, consequently, at the same time mutually exclusive ends, is the will. The will [246/483] that is determined by empirically given ends is not free. The choice between conflicting ends occurs in a necessary way, according to natural laws. In this respect, human being and animal are distinguished merely by the fact that with the former (by a possible expansion of its cognition) there is choice between more ends than with the latter (owing to its restricted cognition): that is, there is a difference in the matter [Stofs], but not in the form, of this choice. In the beginning of the development of human nature, the choice can only be animal. Alone, by degrees, a new power develops in human beings, and is brought to consciousness. A human being begins to notice that every choice, before being determined (owing to the exclusiveness of an end bound up with it) requires of him a restraint [Zwang]; that, after a choice occurs, he is granted a rather unique kind of satisfaction. Self-restraint is now, in relation to a given end, not merely a means to achieving another given end, greater than the former; it becomes [247/484] the means for achieving a new end, not given empirically, but rather by the subject (the individual) itself. In the first place, an individual may want to be moderate only in order to preserve his health and to extend his life, which he holds as a far greater end than the satisfaction of his unrestrained desires. He soon realizes that the actual moderation of these requires of him restraint; but that, after the self-imposed restraint, he experiences a satisfaction that does not merely consist in the end he has chosen (health and a long life), but rather in an end that he (since he did not know it) had not chosen, but which, after he learned to recognize it as an end, he now knows to be the object of a choice (on a collision course with other ends). — Now his will is free. The choice is no longer determined in a mechanical way, by giving greater weight to the chosen end over the end excluded by the choice,

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but rather through the freedom of the subject [248/485] to give himself a purpose, over and against all given purposes. This freedom can be acquired bit by bit by exercising it, and become a skill, and, as I have shown, constitute the character of a great personage. On the other hand, freedom of the will, which the moral law postulates, and which is not initially acquired through use, but should be immediately put into practice by that law, does not constitute human greatness, but the divine greatness of humanity. It is conceived as a postulate; but that freedom can be represented empirically as a fact. One may want to argue that the freedom acquired through practice, as a skill of resisting the inclinations in general, far from increasing the feeling of human greatness would rather decrease, since resistance, as its cause, always decreases in circumstances in which skill increases. Then one does not consider that this decrease of the resistance is itself a consequence of all acts of resistance previously accomplished, and the diminution itself in the particular [249/486] case offers a proof of the touch of greatness of the subject in general. I will not arbitrarily accept into this investigation the concept of human greatness; rather, I will seek to determine the linguistic usage through induction of all cases where an individual is called great, and through exclusion of all cases where he appears to be great, but is not. If this investigation is embarrassing for people like that, it is their own fault. Although one knows what is important in a matter one cares about, it is not always easy to bring it about. To become a great personage is indeed quite easy in as much as it depends upon nothing but (not pure wish, but rather) the will of the subject. But even then it is at the same time quite difficult: since the subject, which also has a will contrary to this will, must live in constant struggle with himself, until after much bitter work the end can be achieved, more or less. Even if one has [250/487] marked out the way to a place, it can still be an expensive trip before reaching the destination. But the former is the necessary condition for the latter, and must initially be carried out. A mathematical size [Größe] can be increased and decreased to infinity. This means: every quantum (a quantity capable of existing) can receive any quantity without changing its essence [Wesen] and ceasing to be the same quantum, because its essence does not depend upon a particular quantity (basic mathematics knows how to explain the appearance of the possible

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transition of one quantum into another, for example, of a polygon into a circle, so that it does not contradict that principle). As long as the mathematical size of an object is comparable to the size of another of its kind, and is measurable through a common yardstick, it can create no feeling of aesthetic greatness.107 [251/488] Even if an object may still be greater than another, or great (that is, greater than usual), or even the greatest of its kind, it is not therefore aesthetically great, since it is represented through these expressions as comparable to others of its kind. However, the size of an object may increase so that the size of another of its kind cannot be considered at all, but rather is valued as nothing; then the idea of this mathematical magnitude generates a feeling of aesthetic greatness. The object then steps into a new class of being, and is compared and measured according to a new unity with others of this class. Mont Blanc, as the highest mountain in Europe, doubtlessly excites the feeling of aesthetic greatness, since ordinary mountains can’t be considered against it, even though it is not the highest among all mountains, but surpassed by those of America. [252/489] Both are objects of aesthetic greatness, and cannot be compared with ordinary mountains, but rather with one another, in view of their magnitude. With the expression “a great personage” we do not wish to imply merely a man of impressive (uncustomary) mathematical magnitude, neither of his body nor of his physical or spiritual powers, but rather one who, because of his incomparable mathematical magnitude, is capable of producing in us the feeling of aesthetic greatness. Further, this idea of a great personage is not accompanied in us by such aesthetic feelings as is the idea of an aesthetically great product of nature or art. No, here the feeling is not merely a dead force; rather, it awakens our activity to emulate the great personage, that is, we set him up for ourselves as a paradigm for imitation. I appeal here to everyone’s own consciousness, for a fact of this sort cannot be confirmed otherwise. [253/490] Therefore, a great personage is one whose qualities are of such mathematical magnitude that the idea of that magnitude produces in the subject a feeling of aesthetic greatness, and at the same time a striving (if indeed quite weak at times) to imitate it. From both these characteristics it is easy to prove who is not a great personage, even if he 107. [The mathematical judgment is based upon a very clear knowledge of the object, and can be specified by number and measure.]

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appears to be great; and from there follows the answer to the question, who is a great personage? Gifts of nature, of whatever magnitude one wishes, cannot give one the right to this title, in so far as the free will of the subject has no influence upon them. A giant, that is, an individual of a size against which the size of other individuals seems like nothing, can however (along with the gigantic mountain) awaken in us a feeling of aesthetic greatness. Nevertheless, we cannot however establish it as a paradigm for imitation for us. This is what the frog in the fable did when he inflated himself until he burst. The giantess, who a few years ago one could pay to see, was called “the great woman”; but in a completely different sense than when [254/491] one is called a great personage! In this sense perhaps the great woman would be an even greater rarity. At least Ecclesiastes states: “I have found one man (it is preferable to call him that) among a thousand; but I have found no woman among all these.”108 Physical strength, as a gift of nature (muscular power and bone structure) warrant this even less. The wrestler Milo, on the other hand, who (as is known) first carried a calf and then an adult bull on his shoulders around the stadium, does not deserve that honorable title, since he was narrow-minded and bigoted; yet he nevertheless excites in us a feeling of aesthetic greatness, given the way he achieved his extraordinary strength, and a striving (as far as it goes) to emulate him. A great hero is therefore not yet a great personage, but a bit of one. In the tumult of battle, he displays fearlessness, courage in the face of danger, and tenacity in enduring hardships: these qualities awaken the feeling of aesthetic [255/492] greatness, and kindle imitation.109 He places even fearless courage, even steadfast perseverance, under his own control, in the overcoming of his inclinations and passions; thus would he earn that name with complete justification. However, he does not remain in battle; shamefully, he died in his bed later, ill from low humors. Away goes the great personage! Inborn intellectual talents give one even less right to the title, since they cannot be a model to imitate for anyone who does not share them. Only 108. [Chapter 7, v. 49 (translator’s note: the actual passage is from 7: 8).] 109. Compare to Kant, Critique of Judgment §28 (AA V 263): “...when [people] compare the stateman with the general...an aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the general. Even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way....”

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through their freely undertaken and continually developing culture can a man become great, and therefore serve as a paradigm for imitation. — The greatest of all natural abilities is without doubt genius. It differs from what the French call esprit, in that the latter causes only a liveliness of the intellect, by which, instigated by some object represented, ideas associated with it in any way (by similarity, contrast, coexistence [256/493], succession, and the like) flow inexorably from all sides. The subject amuses itself with these and others in a certain way, but for lack of an intentional [zweckmäßig] choice made after a correct judgment, no objective knowledge can be determined in this way. Genius, on the other hand, is the power [Vermögen] to act purposively [zweckmäßig], without a clear idea either of the end or of the means leading to it. The power of judgment, although in an obscure way, must therefore always accompany genius, if it should merit this name. It also differs from the methodological power of invention,110 by the fact that either the end (of the sought-for knowledge) must be given, and it should find the means according to the analytical method, that is, given the knowledge whereby it can be synthetically determined; or conversely, the means is given from which the end is to be found directly. Genius on the other hand needs nothing to be given [257/494]; it embraces means and end at once in their natural connection, without initiating a logical circle. Pure liveliness of intellect, unaccompanied by the power of judgment, can at best come up with good ideas, but does not know how to use them purposively. The methodological inventor can do without the genius, however, only under certain restrictions. Genius on the other hand is self-sufficient in its work; and if, after it completes the whole work by itself, and has achieved an invention, it, as it were, undertakes this operation anew according to definite methods, then this is to be seen merely as a proof of the calculation, not of the correctness of the rule by which one must proceed, but only that one has followed the rule. A two-fold pleasant feeling accompanies the activity of genius: first, the feeling of self-sufficient activity that depends on no one apart from oneself; second, the inner perception of the purposiveness of this work, and the prediction of its good consequences. But even this pleasant feeling [258/495] of unhindered activity, and the inclination to presuppose that 110. [Compare to the statement of Herr Vers: “Genius and Methodological Invention,” Berlinische Monatsschrift (October 1795), no. 6.]

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what one desires already exists, can make it easy to get lost. Indeed, genius never gets into that problem; but there may be a doubt as to whether genius worked all the way through to the completion of the operation. Repeated methodological invention must lift this doubt. So although genius as a power is like a gift of nature, since it is based on nothing but the happy connection of an excellent fecundity of the intellect with a proportionate power of judgment, the actual exercise of genius is a matter of freedom, and presupposes an intrinsic power of the subject [Selbstmacht des Subjektes] to combine purposively the two capacities acting against one another in such a way that the sum of their activity is a maximum. The fecundity of the intellect inclines it to unbind itself from the fetters of the power of judgment, and to wish not to subjugate itself to any objective laws.111 It therefore takes a great deal of self-overcoming to act consistently against this inclination according to a correct judgment of the inclination’s objective purposiveness. — Therefore, in respect [259/496] of his great genius, even the great personage is not great merely owing to the feeling of aesthetic greatness that his natural gifts awaken. For this feeling can never become pragmatic, and the gift of nature set up as model for free imitation; rather, it is pragmatic above all owing to another feeling of aesthetic greatness, of the subject’s intrinsic power, namely, in a restriction of its natural freedom to conditions of agreement with objective lawfulness, which feeling however is for anyone who has more or less shared that natural gift. From this it is understandable why not every faculty of cognition, owing to its exquisite greatness, elevates its owner to the rank of a great personage in a similar way. Thus, ingenuity and wit,112 if they far exceed the usual measure in their respective subjects that nothing compares to them, [260/497] can both make a claim to aesthetic greatness; and still one is rather inclined to concede the title of a great individual to the ingenious mind rather than the witty one. Why? Since ingenuity (although according to its first conception, is a gift of nature, it is nevertheless cultivated and brought to maturity only by the subject’s great self-control, and by a rigorous and consistent attention to the smallest details of a thing) opposes the inclination to easy action according to subjective laws of the imagination (the association of 111. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §50: “On the Combination of Taste and Genius in Products of Fine Art.” 112. [As you know, ingenuity is the capacity to notice differences, and wit, the capacity to notice the similarities of things.]

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ideas). Wit on the other hand does not presuppose such self-rule in its expression. It is left to its natural devices. Its activity is more play than work. Genuine wit demands, admittedly, a moderate inhibition of this natural course, and a choice among, as it were, self-evident similarities. But in what does this genuine wit consist, other than in the connection with ingenuity (locating the differences between these similarities themselves), and in a power of judgment (the intentional [zweckmäßigen] choice between them)? Wit is also [261/498] more manifest than ingenuity; the latter must therefore initially destroy the preceding effect of the former, the subjective connection, before it makes the material suitable for an objective connection, which demands a greater activity of the self [Selbsttätigkeit] than the unrestrained expression of wit. — Here too then the greatness of the subject is calculated not through the aesthetic greatness of its utterances per se, but rather by the way it is reached pragmatically, determined by freedom and arranged for freedom as a pattern. The intellectual greatness of an individual cannot be determined either by the size or extent of what he causes, but rather must be determined in itself. Otherwise, we would have to take the compiler of large dictionaries for a great individual, which is not the case. To write a work so great in scope that its matter has no inner connection [262/499], but is merely bound together externally, requires only diligence and middling judgment. For each article, one does not need to think about the rest at the same time. The author can make his work as easy as he will, and work daily on one or two articles until he has completed all of them. — Indeed, when the material stands in an inner, but only one-sided, connection (as cause and effect); when no system in the rigorous sense is established, according to which the materials mutually determine each other, the greatness of the work still gives no proof of the greatness of the author. Euclid’s work, in the greatness of its scope, the correctness of its contents, the thoroughness of its method, and the most precise order and connectedness of its propositions, nevertheless might have been composed in such a way that the author would invent a few propositions today, a few tomorrow, and so on, since subsequent propositions always depend upon the preceding ones, but not vice versa. When Pythagoras, owing to the discovery of the theorem named for him, [263/500] offered to the gods a hecatomb in joy and gratitude, this certainly did not happen because of this proposition in itself, which was no more difficult to invent than any other elementary proposition, but rather because Pythagoras’ great genius had let him see the fruitfulness of the

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proposition, and in it, the entire system of connected truths, as it were, in germ. Archimedes’ work is by no means as extensive as Euclid’s geometry; but his inventions betray extraordinary genius, with which he was able to bring a multiplicity of objects into a unity and a purposive connection. He could not solve the problem of King Hiero’s crown until he discovered in it the basis of all hydrostatics.113 Genius belongs to a system (when this is understood only as the fecundity of the intellect in the creation of all ideas connected with an object), and to a power of judgment (to the proper choice of parts, and their connection with each other). A system cannot be constructed piecemeal, but rather [264/501] all at once, although its proper development requires much time and trouble. The constant struggle between genius and the power of judgment — wherein the latter restrains the progress of the former, and seeks to break away from it, and where naturally the power of judgment, as the weaker party (by restraining the drive for unhindered activity) would come up short — cannot be resolved by the inner power [Selbstmachung] of the subject to act upon a representation of objective purposiveness against subjective inclination. The inner power is all the greater, the greater the expression of the genius it opposes, just as the power of a wagon wheel that halts in its course must be all the greater the faster the wagon rolls. The greatness of the genius does not constitute the greatness of the individual, but rather is merely an opportunity to display this greatness, just as the swift rolling of the wagon grants no force to what stops it, but merely gives cause for the expression of this force. From this it is seen that all human greatness, even though it seems to lie elsewhere [265/502], is nevertheless grounded solely in the power the subject acquires to master itself and withstand its inclinations.

113. According to a story related by Vitruvius, King Hiero, suspecting that his crown was not pure gold, gave the crown to Archimedes to investigate. Because the crown was a sacred object, Archimedes could not destroy it in order to discover its properties. One day, as he stepped into his bath, Archimedes noticed the volume of water displaced when he entered. Famously shouting, “Eureka!” (“I found it!”), Archimedes placed a weight of pure gold into a bowl of water, measuring the water displaced, then repeated this with the crown. In this manner, he discovered that King Hiero’s goldsmith had replaced some of the gold with a silver alloy. He also discovered the basic principles of hydrostatics.

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In order to clarify the object further, and shine a brighter light on the correctness of our explanation, we will now consider the opposite phenomenon, namely, human inferiority [Kleinheit]. — All so-called mental illness, which is commonly held to be an error of the power of cognition, is in fact nothing other than impotence, or weakness of the will, and cannot be alleviated by psychological quackery, but only through strength of the subject’s intent, after one becomes aware of the nature of the disease. The most customary among these are hypochondria and mood disorder [Launekrankheit]. The first consists in the fact that the subject is induced by certain unpleasant bodily feelings, whose causes are unknown to him, to accept false ideas of their relation to things outside of him as factually true, which tends to produce similarly unpleasant [266/503] feelings, and from this to explain to himself the source of those feelings. This is similar to the process of the imagination in dreams, where, for example, unusual inner heat causes the idea of a conflagration. The hypochondriac is afflicted with flatulence (or stomach cramps, pregnancy symptoms, and the like) but doesn’t know the cause of the symptoms; this uncertainty then gives rise to an increased unpleasant physical feeling in him, whose physical causes remain unknown to him. In order therefore to give an account of it to himself and to others, as it were, he imagines his body to be weaker than it really is, and his external circumstances and relationships to be far worse than they really are. In so doing, he attributes a psychological basis [a false idea of profound weakness] to the unpleasant feeling, which must have a cause, and, in his opinion, has no [known] physical cause.114 And so his mental illness arises, by means of which he combines certain ideas of the true situation of things in an inappropriate way, and does not consider things from the proper point of view. — One might get rid of the physical causes of this unpleasant physical feeling [267/504] 114. Maimon’s point here is to show the power false ideas have over physical states. The hypochondriac feels a discomfort whose causes he cannot identify. As a result, he supposes or imagines that some mysterious cause is responsible for this discomfort, that is, he “accepts false ideas” about the relation between what he feels and things “outside him” that could have caused this feeling. Maimon labels this misattribution a “psychological cause” because it is brought about by false ideas that manage to corrupt one’s mental state. Therefore, if the actual physical cause of a pain is removed, the psychological misattribution — the “false ideas” — persist. The hypochondriac is not delusional; he’s merely tragically confused.

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(flatulence, for example); this does not abolish the illness itself, but only that which it had caused [the unpleasant feeling]. One may indeed show the hypochondriac the extent to which the cause of this feeling was physical, and that he had sought it elsewhere, out of ignorance, and moreover in false ideas; even this does not dispel the illness, but at most the lack of knowledge which helped to bring it about. The illness itself has become a habit, where it has become customary to combine a certain idea in one way (true or false) and not in another, that is, in a lack of power of the will over ideas. This power is gradually acquired through deliberate cancelation [Aufhebung] of combinations that habitually arise in a mechanical way; and when acquired, does not create new combinations of this kind. Therefore, only through a subject’s firm intention to distinguish the resulting combinations can the illness be alleviated; all other methods of cure are unsuccessful here. [268/505] Mood disorder consists in a predisposition to certain kinds of affects, which has gradually become fixed through frequent and habitual expression. It is therefore joyful or sad, since all affects themselves can be divided into these two main classes. In this state of mind the idea, which once caused the affects, as well as the affects themselves, are never annihilated, but merely obscured; as a result, they reappear at the slightest occasion. Who does not now see that this illness consists in the lack of power of the subject over its ideas? The nonsensical [Unsinnigkeit] is the inability to connect ideas according to some known law (of the understanding or the imagination). It is a continuous unconscious distraction of the subject, lacking the power to collect itself again. Anyone distracted in society soon notices this; he therefore abstains from speaking until he has gathered himself. If he had expressed incoherent ideas in speech as they followed each other, he would rightly [269/506] be considered nonsensical. Once again, a lack of power of the subject over its ideas! Delusion [Wahnsinn] is correct reasoning rooted in false principles, as, for example, someone who stubbornly imagined that he was made of glass demanding all the caution that such a fragile thing required. These false principles are products of the imagination; as in the previous example, the outlandish expression of the fragility of individuals, taken in the genuine sense, gives him an image, and causes him to make an involuntary application of it to all individuals. Imagination can be bridled by the power of the subject.

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Lunacy [Wahnwitz] and folly [Aberwitz] are both opposed to the healthy human understanding. Madness is the same as lunacy, except that the latter expression is merely a false idea that a delusion [Wahn] is empty; the former however indicates the related folly of presenting the false idea as true. A certain Herr Klug, who was so unwise as to believe firmly that he was being pursued and in fact visited by Friedrich the Great, was [270/507] mad in so far as the entire pretense was merely a conceit.115 Since he however even sought to prove it rationally (mainly, he had written a lampoon against the great king), he was to this extent insane. The wit was genuine: he compared his case with similar ones, where the author of a slander on princes suffered punishment, but applied this in support of a delusion. — Folly on the other hand designates the inauthenticity of the wit, which is tempted by false ideas. The healthy human understanding [gesunde Menschenverstand] is the power of the subject to give the faculty of cognition such a position that it can most effectively grasp the objects of cognition. Think of an eye so created that merely by altering its shape and position, as the circumstances require, it could perform the services of an unaided eye, a microscope, a telescope, etc.: this would be an image of the healthy human understanding. No one can miss this; as a power, it is given to every individual. Those who suffer from mental illness only lack the power to use it. They [271/508] have once become accustomed to giving a certain disposition to the eye of their knowledge. They want to see things that properly belong to the unaided eye, by looking through the microscope or the telescope. Only a fixed intent to restore the natural freedom and mobility of the eye can remedy their evil. All this suffices to prove that so-called mental illness is not an illness of knowledge, but rather a genuine illness of the will, and therefore alleviated through nothing other than by acquiring freedom of the will. To get as much physical health as possible is a duty for each individual; but it cannot be a duty to be physically healthy, since this also depends upon external circumstances. On the other hand, it is not only a duty to get as much health of soul as possible, but rather to be a healthy soul, since this depends only upon the uses of freedom of the will. It also follows from this that a great personage and a spiritually healthy individual are the same; and if someone, from false modesty, [272/509] 115. That Herr Klug turns out to be unwise, is a pun of sorts: Klugheit means cleverness.

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wishes to abandon the claim to the former title entirely, he cannot do it in regard to the latter. For who does not want to be healthy? — The ideal of a great or spiritually healthy individual is therefore one who has his ideas completely within his power; who, even though he is not disposed to do so, begins to connect a series of ideas according to some law, continue them, or break them off, or exchange them with one another, even against his inclinations. He will be great in everything he attempts to be. He needs only to move himself to make his productive (poetic) imagination prevail, but to allow the reproductive imagination and the other powers of cognition to collaborate only to the extent necessary for that purpose; he becomes a great poet only for this reason. One needs to prepare himself to care for the common good, to use his accumulated insights and experiences related to this object for this purpose, to act with courage and resolve according to an unvarnished plan in spite of all the obstacles that stand in his way; thus is [273/510] he a great statesman. One intends to collect martial laurels: after sufficient knowledge, after comparing his powers with the obstacles and dangers he faces, and after a probable calculation of the benefit of the former, to banish all ideas of fear and anxiety, to go to work with courage and resolve according to a fixed plan, or to modify it on the spot according to the needs of the situation (which all depends upon the power acquired over his ideas); thus is he a great commander. So it is not because someone is a great poet, statesman, or commander that he is a great personage. Nature and fortune might have appointed him to where he would always be very useful and appreciated, but not a great personage. Rather, the reverse: since someone is a great personage whose character consists in the fact that he has his ideas (and consequently even actions, in so far as these are determined by it) completely within his control [Gewalt], he is a great poet, statesman, commander, or whatever else he is. These are only [274/511] special cases, which express the great personage. One must first have this control before one can be great in any particular field. From this it can be explained why in our age with a culture so elevated, with the extension and perfection of the arts and sciences, and the refinement of taste, the number of great personages has not risen even in these conditions. Because in the first place our culture is one-sided in cultivating the powers of knowledge and feeling; the most important and, for the education of a great individual, most indispensable culture, the culture of the will, is still entirely neglected. Our age does not lack for talented and knowledgeable individuals. — Pitt is not a great personage owing to his

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great political knowledge and his eloquence (in England there are even men who exceed him in this), but rather owing to his steadfast principles, to his courage in the face of dangers, and his indefatigable activity in following his plan and rising above impediments. [275/512] Among the nobility men of extraordinary talents are not uncommon, but great individuals are. Why? Because the education of the nobility is in this respect perhaps even worse than that of the middle class. The common citizen must practice some trade to feed himself; to this end, as much as he enjoys idleness, he must learn something and work constantly, that is, consistently act on a solid plan. The noble who inherits his wealth does not need to work in this fashion, and is only too easily seduced to do nothing. For a few years or so he will join the military, or hold a position in the court, then retire (as if he had done something significant!), and either consume his income in some great place, or occupy his estate, get married, have children, etc. Such an owner of property and wealth would find it very strange to be advised to allow his son to study mathematics. “He should become a soldier, not a scholar.” Fine, gracious Sir. But your son should become a man. [276/513] He should correctly and fundamentally learn to think; he should have the determination to undertake important, intellectually strenuous activities, and be hardened by them to perseverance; and all this he can acquire through the study of mathematics. Should he afterwards not even keep in his head a single proposition of this science, the consequences of that exercise for his character could still not fail to appear. — Do I need to add that many think and behave more correctly [than before]? And that I do not doubt their right to be called honorable and useful individuals, but only their right to be called great personages? I have the good fortune to know a nobleman of extraordinary talents, who, in spite of the usual education of his position, cultivates the great mind he received from nature, and who surely through firmness and perseverance in these noble intentions will not only receive the title of a great personage, but will earn it as well. Women of great talent are not uncommon; but great women? At the least, they are extremely rare, partly because of the weaknesses inherent in their sex, [277/514] partly because of their domestic and political relations with the opposite sex. Petty emotions and passions (not aiming at great intellectual and moral ends); exclusion from important business; the slavish obsequiousness of women in some nations, as well as their unrestrained lust for power in others: these are natural impediments to

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self-rule, and the strength of will on which all human greatness rests. There are also, however, exceptions. Through the previous investigation, we are in the position in this respect to judge famous persons old and new. Since this however would require a work of its own, I will list at the end of my essay merely a single individual, whose greatness is not sufficiently appreciated. The first great personage known to us from ancient history is without doubt the Jewish lawgiver Moses. Innate talent, genius, education (in an Egyptian court), and instruction (in every Egyptian branch of knowledge) indeed gave the foundations of his greatness; [278/515] but he made himself a great personage. The first deed by which he showed himself as a young man destined for this rank reveals a warmth of feeling for justice, and a high courage to oppose all oppression and injustice. But since he felt himself called to still greater deeds, he evaded the persecutions that this action might have brought to him, and went to Midian. Here, in his lonely shepherd’s life, he had to think over his life’s great plan and firmly settle upon it. This consisted in nothing less than liberating his slavishly oppressed nation, developing its moral character, and giving it a political existence — What power, what means did he have at hand to achieve this great purpose? For he could not count on collaboration from his uneducated, slavish, and cowardly nation. None other than his direct connection with his god Jehova! This gave him the greatest power imaginable. I want to explain myself further. [279/516] The patriarchal idea of God as an otherworldly self-subsistent cause of all things, contrary to paganism, was passed on by the Patriarchs to their descendants. This idea was anthropomorphic (of human construct); and God is not merely the universal first cause, which in this respect had no special relationship with humanity, but rather is represented as a most wise and just cause. These attributes are peculiar to human beings, and can only reach to divinity in relation to human beings. The Patriarchs were led to this characteristic of God solely by considering nature: they were led to wisdom, by observing the order and purposiveness of nature in general, in respect of humankind; to justice, by observing their own individual state, in which they believed that they had discovered the agreement of the moral with the physical order of things (their morality and their wellbeing). But this observation, which merely had their individuality as its object, was quite narrow-minded. Through more experience, [280/517] the Patriarchs

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could be taught that such an agreement does not in general occur. Moses was induced by the undeserved oppression of his nation to reflect further on these matters. He found that the agreement of the moral with the natural order could not be represented [dargestellt] empirically, but only thought by pure reason, and could be postulated by it for the purpose of its moral law. His God is now not the cold concept of a first cause, to which no object can be given; neither is it anthropomorphized by empirical properties, endowed with qualities by one-sided observations; it is rather a God postulated by pure reason a priori as a wise and just God, for the purpose of postulating his moral laws as an a priori fact. Moses expressed this new and important discovery by introducing his new God to them in the following way: “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the character of the almighty God (ruling all of nature); but by [281/518] my name Jehova, (postulated by the “what will be”), I was not known to them”; this discovery demands a natural order of things appropriate to the moral order.116 This order, then, should be restored in view of Moses’s oppressed people.117 This discovery gave him an irresistible power, because it concerned the moral nature of human beings, to which their physical nature should be subordinate, and is able to be subordinated by postulating freedom. To be sure, Moses also used his physical power, which he had obtained by means of the secret knowledge of nature acquired by the Egyptian priests, and in which he finally surpassed his masters, to perform the so-called signs and wonders. However, without that moral power over himself, he would have been deterred by the many impediments to and hardships of his great project. The liberation of his people was happily brought to completion only in this way. 116. Exodus 6:3. Maimon’s “Jehova” translates the Tetragrammaton (the Hebrew abbreviation for the divine name uttered in Exodus 3:14): ‫יהוה‬. The abbreviation stands for the phrase: ‫( אהיה אשר אהיה‬Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh). The phrase defies translation. The phrase is in the imperfect tense, signaling an action begun in the past and continuing into the future; it could be rendered, “I am that I am,” or “I will be what I will be.” Maimon, following rabbinic tradition, reminds the reader of the future tense of the Divine name. 117. Maimon is, I believe, being deliberately ambiguous here: he could be speaking about Moses and the past, or he could be insinuating something about the situation of European Jews in the present. The latter possibility gains some support from the way Maimon introduces Moses: he is a personage “whose greatness is not sufficiently appreciated.”

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But now the most difficult task arises: to teach a slavish, unwise, and uncivilized people the higher knowledge and morality; [282/519] to rule a great number of individuals, who, at one moment, despair out of fear at the first sight of enemies, at another moment surrender to their raw and impetuous desires, at another renounce all rational and lawful obedience; to instill courage in the cowardly, to satisfy wild desires in the Arabian desert, and, where necessary, to obtain obedience by coercion. To introduce law and order among such individuals! — Moses spent his life in restless activity according to this plan. His confidence in Jehova, i. e., in the possible approximation to the idea of a holy moral being through freedom, allowed him to defy all dangers and obstacles. He was never confounded, and never abandoned by the presence of the intellect. Through the freedom and power over his affects he acquired, he could reach old age without being affected by the usual weaknesses. “Moses, it is said, was one hundred and twenty years old, then he died; his eyes did not darken, and his fluids did not dry up” (he had no wrinkles). — [283/520] What greatness does not embrace merely this single feature: that that which seems to indicate only a natural phenomenon actually indicates a moral phenomenon!

Explanation of a Well-known Anthropological Phenomenon118 Y_Z [61/521] “But it is worth noting,” Kant states (Anthropology, 4), “that the child who can already speak fairly fluently nevertheless first begins to talk using the pronoun “I” fairly late (perhaps a year later); in the meantime speaking of himself in the third person (“Karl wants to eat, to walk, etc.). [62/522] When he starts to speak using “I” a light seems to dawn on him, as it were, and from that day on he never again returns to his former way of speaking. — Before, he merely felt himself; now he thinks himself. — The explanation of this phenomenon might be rather difficult for the anthropologist.”119 The intention of the last statement of this great philosopher was certainly not to frighten off others from explaining this phenomenon owing to the difficulty of the undertaking, but more so to encourage it. I therefore do not hesitate to submit an attempt for consideration. But before I proceed, I wish only to note that this phenomenon is not restricted merely by observation in respect of the “I,” but also in respect of the “you” [du] and the remaining pronouns (pronominal). Just as a child says “Karl wants” instead of beginning, “I want,” he also says, for 118. Neue Berlinische Monatsschrift (1800), 61–72; GW VII: 521–32. 119. This translation is taken from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert B. Louden and Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 93

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example, “Father beats me,” rather than, “you beat me.”120 [63/523] The difficulty with learning the correct usage of these expressions is common to the entire part of speech to which they belong, and is raised in all of them in the same way. It is located in part in the way a child learns to speak, and in part because these expressions, according to their true meanings, cannot be learned in the same way as the rest of language. As is known, a child learns to speak by showing him an object and then pronouncing the object’s name. [64/524] Repeated a few times, this connects the idea of the object with the idea of its name, according to familiar laws of association, so that as soon as the latter is reproduced, and vice versa. — The use of the pronoun on the other hand cannot be learned in this fashion by a child. I wish merely to try to investigate the “I” and the “you”; for what can be proven about them can easily be applied to the remaining pronouns. No one has nor will come up with the idea of teaching the word “I” to a child by speaking the word and pointing (with signs) to the person of the child. The only result this would have is that the child must then believe that “I” would be his proper name (just like “Karl”). The child would therefore use the word correctly when speaking of himself, but not as a pronoun. What would be gained? A child like this, instead of the previous “Karl wants,” will sometimes say, “I want.” Only now, [65/525] when someone else uses this word of himself the child will not understand it at all, but will confuse the person speaking with his own person. However, just as the person speaking can at first only pronounce the word “I” and point to himself, the child could not learn to use it as a pronoun. In this case, the child will take the word “I” for the proper name of the speaker, and consequently become accustomed to using it this way, but will not apply “I” to himself. 120. [This remark is certainly quite correct. For a third observation it is perhaps also useful to note the persons who have a child [63/523] constantly around them than to note the child itself. The result here is most convenient; for those persons learn to speak, as it were, mechanically, through continued interaction, or instinctively, through the need to speak understandably, very happy to meet the way of thinking and speaking of the child. But now a mother, when she talks to her child, will very rarely use pronouns. She says: “Karl must come nicely when mother calls”; or, when mother calls: “Karl.” When she speaks to the child about the father, she rather uses the word “father” ten times before she uses the pronoun.]

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And what increases the difficulty even more is the fact that the child has to notice how not only a single person, but countless people (father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, guardian, etc.) use the word “I” to indicate their own person. The same difficulty also arises with the word “you.” How can a child learn to use it? For example, because the speaker pronounces this word and points to himself? Then the child has to take the word “you” for the actual name of the speaker; [66/526] and while he will use this word correctly of the one speaking, the child will however not be able to find himself when the word is spoken to him. No one teaches this word to a child in this manner. So, vice versa: The speaker points to the person of the child. But then the child will take this word for his proper name, and in fact understand correctly the others who use this word when speaking to him, but never use it when speaking to another. And what’s worse, the child notes how the word “you” is used not only in speaking to him, but to countless others who use the word “you.” How then can he find himself? However, what seems to increase the difficulty is exactly the means to alleviate it. — In order the disentangle the confusion, and in order to satisfy the drive to understand others and to make oneself understood, which is constantly intensifying as a result of ever-increasing needs and by the feeling of one’s own weakness and dependency on others in order to satisfy those needs, [67/527] the child is compelled to a higher degree of reflection and abstraction. In this way, the process comes down to the idea that the oft-mentioned expressions are, first of all, not proper names (indicating individual persons), since they are used by countless persons. Second, that they are also not general names of objects that are placed by some similarity other than language itself under a general concept (as, for example, bread, spoon, knife, etc.), since they (somewhat like the word “man”) are then used in the same way both by the speaker and by the one spoken to. Third, they are general expressions for many persons, whose similarity is determined merely through speech itself, so that simply by speaking many are gathered up in a single concept. I mean the subject of the discourse (the speaking person), who is at the same time the object of the speaking. Suppose, however, that except when referring to himself [68/528], there is only one single person in the world with whom the child could speak? I maintain, then, that he would never learn to use these expressions. How then could he acquire these highly general and abstract concepts?

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How these concepts come about is, however, understandable: the concept forms because the child recognizes himself as an individual by an inner feeling, even before he has learned the word “I,” and by his resemblance to similar individuals. Only now, there is no mention of concepts, but of expressions. It is impossible to become acquainted with the use of these latter in abstracto, before one has learned them in concreto, which, as has already been shown, cannot occur before the abstraction of the concepts. Thus, in the assumed case, the child will take the word “I” that he hears spoken only for the speaker’s own name, and will never use it of himself. But since there are now several people who use this word of themselves, the child can no longer take it for his own name, but will not [69/528] apply it immediately to designate himself (since he heard no one call him that); rather, perhaps to designate all those who so call themselves, and therefore would always use the “I” instead of “you.” Thus, to remark that not only this one or that one, but rather that each person in general is called “I” (my name, as it were, is “I”), is not yet adequate to determine the true meaning of this word as a pronoun. Add to that the remark, that each person calls itself that, but no one else (so-called only by his own mouth). Thus, the child first learns the proper meaning of this word as the person speaking at present (speaking this word). He will therefore from now on refer, not to the person to whom he speaks, but rather to himself as the person who is speaking, with “I” — and he will never again swap this expression for the name he has used up to now (Karl), since not only does he not allow anyone to make such a swap, but also because, although it is not subject to any misinterpretation (since, by saying, “Karl [70/530] wants,” he understands no one other than himself), the form (in the third person) nevertheless does not agree as well with his own inner sensation as does the word “I.” One can perhaps object, that the lack of development of the power of abstraction cannot be the basis of that difficulty, since apart from a few proper names, all other words of the language that the child has already learned are expressions of general concepts, and also assume abstraction. But there is a difference between negative and positive abstraction. The former is based on a lack of knowledge of the particular, the latter, on the other hand, on abstraction from the particular. A child notes the similarity rather than the differences between similar things. He learns to recognize bread, spoon, knife, etc., in general, rather than particular kinds of bread, etc. He is also pleased that all kinds of spoons differing

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in size and material and shape, if they are not unequal to the point of unrecognizability, are given the general name [71/531] “spoon,” and finds nothing in his little mind to oppose such abstraction. — With the “I” on the other hand it is completely different. The child recognizes his “I” by an inner sensation before he learns to recognize another “I” (through resemblance to his own, or by abstracting from it). It will now be necessary to apply the power of abstraction positively, which must be the most difficult, since the “I” must be conceived as outside himself, that is, just like the “not-I.” All other general expressions of language (nomina appellativa) merely indicate relative concepts (in comparison with the particular or the less general), but not absolutely universal concepts, just as particular terms (nomina propria) indicate merely relative particular concepts, since we in fact cannot think of concepts except through general characteristics. Having a concept of an absolutely particular object entails a contradiction. Also, all proper names consist of words that express general characteristics. — The “I” on the other hand expresses a highest general object, and at the same time [72/532] an absolute particular determined by speech itself. This absolute particular is not known by a concept, but rather merely by an inner consciousness; just as a universal is absolutely universal not through general characteristics (so that there can still be something more general), but rather through absolutely universal language (the speaking person conceived as object of the speaking).

The Moral Skeptic121 Y_Z [271/533] If a material principle (happiness, perfection, and the like) is used to ground morality, there can be neither a moral dogmatist nor a moral skeptic, or even one who denies morality. The former does not deny what the latter claims; both agree about the matter [Sache], and differ from each other only in the way they express it. The freedom the one assumes (lack of awareness of the motives that determine the action, or the idea of the possibility that there are other, opposite motives) is not the freedom the other denies (the capacity of the subject, in spite of all motives, to determine itself in a contrary way).122 The ought [das Sollen] of which the one speaks, the other translates by a will [Werden].123 That you ought in general to strive for happiness, for fulfillment, means only that you will, etc. (since you are determined to it by laws of nature). That 121. Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks, vol. 2 (1800), 271–92. GW VII: 533–54. 122. Here, Maimon is distinguishing two senses of freedom. In the first instance, freedom could mean the existence of a plurality of motives for an action, coupled with one’s ignorance of which motive was in play; in the second instance, freedom means the ability to act in accordance with a motive contrary to the one enacted. 123. Werden is the future tense of the infinitive sein, “to be.” Maimon has nominalized it. It is not synonymous with the will, as an object, but with an act of the will, “counseling and commanding.” I have indicated in the text where he shifts between Werden and Wille. 99

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you ought not strive for your current deficient knowledge of happiness, but for a complete realization of your knowledge of happiness, fulfillment, etc., means only that you will strive for it afterward (after having acquired complete knowledge). The attribution [Zurechnung] the one assumes (a representation of something as a consequence of the freedom of the subject) [272/534] is not the attribution the other rejects (since everyone thinks something different about freedom), etc. The moral dogmatist and the moral skeptic (if they still find it good to split into two parties merely owing to modesty of expression) are thus as theoretically and practically alike as one eye to the other! On the other hand, things seem entirely different when according to critical philosophy all material principles are declared unfit to establish [begründen] morality — if the concept of duty is laid down as an unambiguous fact of common human reason, and its principle is discovered in pure reason, and as practically recognizable through this fact. Here the moral skeptic seems like the true antipode of the moral dogmatist. They no longer fight over words, but rather over things [Sache], and over things of great importance. The skeptic doubts the fact that the dogmatist considers unambiguous. The ought [Soll] that serves the former cannot be translated by the latter with a will [Werden], unless it is to lose its true meaning. The freedom that the one postulates, the other declares to be impossible, etc. They therefore appear as remote from one another (to adopt Dr. Slop’s expression) as east from west!124 But the skeptic seems here not only to be directly opposed to the dogmatist; he also seems to be as pleased about it as an angel of light is about the angel of darkness. The dogmatist proceeds from common human reason, whose [273/535] voice the skeptic deliberately does not wish to hear; and since all philosophy must finally be based upon a fact, he is thus robbed of all right to philosophize. The latter raises the individual above every natural being, gives him independence, makes him a person. The former reduces the individual to a machine [Automat], and concedes to him nothing more than the fruitless and humiliating awareness of his inability to avoid the laws of intractable fatalism; and as regards the exercise of morality, the skeptic must sign his own death warrant! — Through his skepticism, he declares himself not only incapable of a moral disposition, but also (according to a well-known saw: what you can’t 124. Dr. Slop is the incompetent village quack of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759).

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wish for, you can’t believe) as an enemy of morality, who, because of his moral corruption, cannot even bear the thought of it. Tournons la médaille!125 What, though, if all this only appears to be the case? If it can be shown that in fact the moral dogmatist has as little theoretical advantage over the skeptic as he does a practical advantage? That just as the latter as much as the former demands a fact for all philosophizing, and even accepts from the former the fact that grounds philosophizing about morality, and only doubts the origin of this fact imputed by the former to reason (which is the sole concern here), and the latter accordingly posits the ought of the former in a will, and changes the postulate into a petitio principi; just so do they clearly remain as distant from one another as east from west [274/536], but in an entirely different sense of this saying than Dr. Slop may think. — Then will the specified angel of light, as much as the angel of darkness, disappear like ghosts. The skeptic does not take away from the dignity of the individual in the least, from its sublimity above all natural laws, independence and personality, which he places in the pure idea of morality (since there is nothing else to show); and as far as the judgment about himself is concerned, he does not take himself to be a hair’s breadth worse than the dogmatist, without being complacent, boastful, or contemptuous of other thinkers. — Far from being an enemy of morality, that is, not desiring to possess it, he finds nothing more sublime and worthy of human dignity than this very possession, which is also the subjective ground that tempts him to doubt this possession. Those who are inclined to explain this are as poor connoisseurs of human things as superstitious people. As is said of the ancient Jacob, who for a long time mourned his beloved lost son: when he was told “your son Joseph lives, etc.,” his heart remained unmoved, because he did not believe them.126 Certainly not because he did not wish it to be true! When the lottery agent comes to a poor rascal who has entered a lottery, and says, “you’ve won the great lottery,” he doesn’t believe it, and even takes it badly on the assumption that the agent was having fun at his expense, until he persuades him of it completely. Certainly not since he did not wish it! Whether or not this is the case in respect of skepticism [275/537] must be discussed in the following investigation. We wish first to speak about imperatives in general, and then about the moral (the so-called categorical) 125. “Let’s flip a coin!” 126. Genesis 45:26.

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imperative, and finally to investigate the grounds upon which it is based. I proceed from the following accepted truths. What is an Imperative?

The question, as is easily seen, is not: what is a grammatical imperative? Every third grader knows what this modus of a verbi means in grammar. What is stated as a command, an order, an admonition, advice, and the like, is an imperative. The question is rather: what is the moral imperative? Here I take the word moral in its other sense, as referring to a will; for so much is agreed upon provisionally, that commanding, giving orders, etc., necessarily has a will [Wille] as an object. Already it can be concluded about the common usage of grammatical imperatives in all these particular instances (in commanding, exhorting, advising, and the like), that these are different species [Arten] of one and the same genus [Geschlechtsbegriff]. The question is therefore: what is the genus? This question is of far greater importance than may at first appear. It does not concern the use of the imperative in common life. The common human understanding knows quite well how to deal with it, without worrying about this genus and its different [276/538] species; rather, the question concerns the meaning of the imperative in itself prior to all use, whereby the limits of this use are determined afterward, and how this use itself can be justified. Many a king has lost his crown and life not by his le roi le veut, but from a lack of a correct concept of the imperative.127 Oh, you emperors! If you learn nothing else, learn at least the use of the imperative! We have already shown sufficiently how a lack of the correct use of this moral imperative lies at the basis of all human follies, affects, and passions, which have the will of others as their object. — For this investigation, Kant places a guide at my fingertips. Imperatives according to him are classified into categorical and hypothetical imperatives. The former (which we’re at least able to conceive) are absolute; the latter however (through the given end of the one commanded or advised) are conditional. We wish first to consider the latter. In my opinion, hypothetical imperatives can, in turn, be conveniently divided into advising and commanding. The former are determined by the will (determining a given end) of the one advised, and by the knowledge of the one who gives the advice; the latter however are determined 127. “The king wishes it.”

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by the knowledge as well as by the will of the one who advises. A wills a given end, but does not know the means by which he can reach it. B knows the means, without thereby willing the end to be obtained (since it is not an end for him, or he lacks other means, of which A is in possession). B then imparts [277/539] his cognition to A, that is, he advises him. The end-determining will of A, and the means-determining knowledge of B, thus constitute the content of the advice. A lord commands his servant to do something. The will of the lord determines the end, and his knowledge determines the subsequent action of the servant as means to the end. The former has power to compel the action. The servant indeed has his preservation, reward, and freedom from punishment as an end, and will therefore obey the lord in all things; but he does not will this particular action (since he otherwise must first be commanded to do it). The knowledge, will, and power of the lord are therefore necessary constituent parts of the command (the power of the servant to perform the action is already presupposed in the knowledge of the lord, and if the former is not found adequate, the blame rests with the latter). Both these species of moral imperatives are indeed expressed grammatically, through an ought; but this ought can fittingly be replaced by a will [Werden]. The one giving advice can, instead of saying, “you ought to do this and that,” say, “you will, by virtue of my knowledge now shared with you, do this and that.” The one commanding could say, “by virtue of my knowledge and my power over you, you will do this.” In fact, neither of them think otherwise with their ought. But in order to avoid this small paraphrase, language has determined this use for the ought. — It is noteworthy, that the most ancient languages (like Hebrew, for example), which have their own imperatives, nevertheless often use them in place of the future tense [278/540], and express themselves, instead of by ought, by will. The legislator is the counselor of the state, as one identical person. The state however, as one identical person, commands every member to respect the laws. The legislator can be a stranger, who is merely appointed to give laws to the state. He therefore does not have his own will, for whose account the laws are given. On the other hand, the state, as an identical person, has its own will, different from the point of view of the wills of every member considered in isolation. The end of the state is the wellbeing of the whole, that is, of all its members. Through this end its express will is determined by laws; this end and this will are indeed also the end and will of every member, but merely as a member of the state, and not considered

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in isolation. The will of the former is rational; the will is restricted by the possible; the latter however is irrational. In a similar way, every member has both these species of will, whereby the rational commands the irrational. Here too the ought can be substituted with will. The state says to all of its members: by virtue of the knowledge of the legislator (who determines the laws as means for achieving my end, and my power to compel you to observe them), you will do this and that. All these imperatives therefore are in effect not true, but rather merely seeming imperatives, since they (if you do not want to be bothered by the effort of a small paraphrase) can be substituted with other modes, without a change of content. [279/541] Now, however, an extremely important question arises: Are there indeed true imperatives, an ought that cannot be confused with a will? The moralist will clearly have an answer immediately at hand. “Yes!” he will say, there is such an imperative, namely the moral-categorical imperative, which expresses an ought that cannot be confused with a will without losing its true meaning. That I should determine the maxim of the will through the laws of reason is something completely different from: I will determine the maxim of the will through these laws. Let us take a closer look. I ought, etc., means two things. In the first place, it expresses an already actual determination of the will through its incessant demand for volition. The will is truly determined in every human being by the maxim of volition that he accepts, which may be good or evil, in the same way: by making that incessant demand for volition. In the second place, “I ought” signifies the determination of the maxim of volition, which is not yet actual, but should actually be determined by that incessant demand. But these two senses can be expressed quite well by a being or a willing. I ought, in the first sense, means: my will is, etc. In the other sense however it means: if my volition is actually determined according to this [incessant] demand (but not merely by this demand, since otherwise the volition would already be determined, and would not require any demand), the maxim of volition will be such and such. Yet, says the moralist, there is no if, but only [280/542] the volition! But what does the moralist gain by repeating that demand in such a useless way that even an evil individual concedes to it! Let us now consider this matter more precisely, and state in advance the following indubitable truths. 1) It is known through general logic that a hypothetical proposition, if A, then also B, can generally be reversed: if not B, then also not A.

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2) A particular power [bestimmtes Vermögen] (not the concept of power in general) cannot be thought as a power except by a particular kind of effect or law, that is, as ground for the possibility of its actuality. A power without laws through which its actuality (in each given case) is determined, is an expression without a concept. If I, for example, ascribed to a body in general an equal power of motion and rest, then I ascribe to it an indeterminate power that, because it is indeterminate, could produce motion just as much as rest, that is, it could produce no effect at all. Attraction, on the other hand, is a power determined by laws according to which it necessarily produces its effect. That the same power that attracts one body, attracts another, and also even under the same conditions, repels it, is an absurdity. It is equally important whether the subject is thought to be determinable as acting through itself or through something external to itself; without a determining ground no actual determination is conceivable. The actuality assumes the possibility. 3) It is against all scientific methods to assume a principle of one’s own to explain a phenomenon if it can be explained from principles which are already known and which are common to other phenomena. 4) What an infinite power of cognition assumes about its capacity to know, is not knowable for a finite power of cognition. So, for example, miracles, that is, phenomena in nature whose possibility is not explicable according to natural laws, are indeed conceivable [denkbar], although not knowable [erkennbar] for a finite power of cognition, since they assume the knowledge of everything possible according to natural laws. From (1) if the proposition is true, it follows that: if the moral law is an a priori fact of practical reason, freedom is then also an a priori postulate of practical reason; or in brief: if the proposition, “if there is a moral law, there is also freedom,” is true, this proposition must also be true: “if there is no freedom, there is also no moral law,” and the appearance of a moral law, as if one were given, must be called an illusion. From (2) it follows that freedom (here I follow the Kantian conception, since what can be said against this can be said with even greater justification against Reinhold), as the power of volition, not urged to action by any sensible determination (according to natural laws), and able to be determined through reason, is an expression without a concept, since this power is conceived as not determined by laws, according to which in any given case a particular [282/544] effect (actual determination of the volition through reason or through sensibility) must follow. According to which

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laws does the subject follow the moral law in one instance but in another instance does not, since both still have the same power? The subject has two equally possible, opposed grounds of determination, but no ground of determination according to which one of the two, to the exclusion of the other, actually determines it. Natural laws cannot determine anything here, because this completely abolishes freedom. Reason even less. A mixture of both here is inconceivable [gar undenkbar]. The actual determination of the volition must therefore be left to chance. But chance, as the determining ground of the practical, is a double non ens [non-being], since chance in itself means nothing other than the lack of a determining ground, and in the practical all attribution [Zurechnung] cancels, that is, it makes the practical that is supposed to be possible through it impossible! I hear some object to me, that the subject determines itself; but here the question is not about causes that the determination produces, but of the reason for the ground of the determination, whereby the determination is possible, without which possibility the actuality cannot occur!128 Proceeding further, I also intend that volition itself is an expression without a concept. For human volition cannot be conceived without freedom, indeed, it is even identical with it. Animal volition (arbitrium brutum) however is merely grounded in the unwisdom of external influence [Unwissenheit der Außchlages]. [283/545] Volition can occur as little without any consciousness as with a predictive [vorhersehenden] awareness of the external influence (the stronger acting external cause). The scale will fluctuate owing to external causes as long as the effect of those causes lasts, and finally the bowl containing the greater weight will be decisive. Substitute consciousness for the scale, and here you have the true image of animal volition! The moral dogmatist agrees with the moral skeptic that freedom is not empirical (while this concept annuls the conditions of a possible experience), and is just as little able to be represented through pure theoretical reason (as mere idea) — therefore not in itself. But here they differ from one another: the dogmatist holds that freedom is inconceivable, but not impossible. 128. Maimon’s discussion recalls Aristotle’s in Metaphysics IX 1–5, concerning the relative priority of possibility (dunamis) and actuality (energeia). Whereas for Aristotle, actuality precedes possibility in definition, time, and substance, Maimon indicates a circularity where each presupposes the priority of the other in order to be. In this way, Maimon undercuts the possibility of a purely self-determining (finite) subject.

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The skeptic however explains freedom as virtually impossible. This difference however is due to the difference in how they conduct their study of morality. The dogmatist, according to his method, grounds his inquiry in a fact of common human understanding (the moral law, whereby a priori reason is shown to be practical), without first inquiring into the manner in which this fact arises (in consciousness). Through this fact freedom is now postulated a priori in a necessary way. It cannot be impossible. The skeptic likewise remains faithful to his method, not to accept a fact until its [284/546] manner of arising has been investigated. For it can perhaps result from this inquiry that this fact is not what it is held to be. As long, therefore, as this fact is ambiguous, the skeptic similarly cannot ground his inquiry. He therefore begins his investigation vice versa, with the concept of freedom underlying all morality, declaring that it is impossible, that is, through theoretical reason, to do so (for the skeptic knows nothing about anything else, completely unimaginable [undarstellbar]).129 This allows him the reasonable supposition (according to 1) that the fact established by the dogmatist was incorrect. This supposition is confirmed by (3) in the following way. An original fact of a priori consciousness is a universally valid and generally accepted judgment, independent from subjective conditions and accidental circumstances, so that the object to which it refers is neither conceivable nor cognizable in any other way. Of this kind are the law of contradiction, of reasons [Grundes], the axioms of mathematics, and so on. That the moral evaluation of the common human reason is no such original fact of consciousness, can be shown only if one can empirically demonstrate (by experience and experiments) that this mode of evaluation is found only under certain accidental circumstances of humanity (in the state of civilization), but not under others (in the states of primitiveness and childhood).130 But since such an experiment [285/547] is hard to set up, the skeptic is content merely to presuppose the possibility of such an experiment and its consequences, and explain the way the moral evaluation arises under given circumstances, from psychological grounds, in the following way. 129. I am estimating where the closed parenthesis should occur. In the Verra edition, there is no closed parenthesis. 130. This argument recalls Aristotle’s in Nicomachean Ethics I.2, that the study of ethics does not admit of mathematical precision, owing to its dependence on custom and opinion.

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All human beings strive after happiness, as the epitome of all their possible ends. Through their theoretical reason (which determines the causal connection of things and their relations to one another as means and ends) they recognize their connection with one another in a society, as the only means to achieve that happiness as completely as is possible for them. A social condition, however, (where through the interaction of the members with one another the common end should be promoted) is only possible as a legal condition.131 Legality of actions is therefore recognized as a condition for the possibility of a social connection. Not just legality in general, but rather a complete and certain legality (extending to all actions, and inevitable in all cases), that is, a legality that can be thought as a necessary consequence of the morality of dispositions. Therefore, morality is not required, but rather the same legality that is a consequence of the intrinsically ambiguous morality. Morality is merely an idea serving a regulative use. — This is the true (original) fact of the common human reason. But since individuals [286/548] in the advancing state of societies originally intended to demand morality, it must be just as disconcerting that all, more or less, love money in itself, which, according to the well-known law of the association of ideas can easily be explained. But also assume that the skeptic granted the dogmatist all his suppositions (which the skeptic doesn’t have the slightest reason to do) for demanding that the ethical law is an original fact, and freedom postulated through it; what is gained by this in respect of the exercise of morality? A demand, where the one who makes this demand can know whether it can be fulfilled as little as the one to whom it is addressed (both are united in the same person), always remains a vain demand! The former says constantly, you ought, and the latter constantly replies, I will, and with that the entire process has an end! The moral sensibility [Gesinnung] is not given by the mere demand. If it is not only conceivable, but rather known actually to be given, this must be done by certain characteristics in intuition. But a moral sensibility cannot be immediately examined. There is therefore no means to know it as such other than according to the method of exclusion; namely, if all possible motives and relations of the subject in their entire extent are examined and recognized to be unfit for explaining the given 131. “Legality of actions” refers to those laws that command actions necessary for human community. Legality therefore expresses our moral commitments on the level of society.

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moral action, it follows that this action is actually moral, that is, it must spring from moral sensibilities. [287/549] This however posits an infinite power of cognition. — Yet, one will say that I will is not a mere wish, but rather intends the summoning of all powers of which the subject can be internally conscious. Now I ask in turn: how can the subject be aware that it is summoning all powers to morality? The summoning of the powers, but not the ground of this summoning, is an object of internal intuition. It therefore remains empty: Sic volo, sic jubeo!132 But this skepticism notwithstanding, the moral skeptic (caeteris paribus), both theoretically and practically, is no worse off than the moral dogmatist. The latter sets down morality as a fact of common human reason; the former as well, only he explains the manner of arising of this fact on psychological grounds. He therefore in no way denies that this fact can be original, but rather he simply does not consider himself justified in positing it as such. The demand for morality, according to him, can only originally be the knowledge of the indispensability of legality (which is guaranteed by the presupposition of morality), and bit by bit this demand, by a familiar kind of association of ideas and custom, can be transferred from the given consequence to the presupposed ground. However, it can be given originally as a demand of morality in itself; but this must not be presupposed according to a scientific method. [288/550] Since he now doubts that morality is grounded in a fact, he cannot (like the dogmatist) base his investigation on the principles developed from this fact, but rather from the concept of the good and of the highest good (from which one always proceeded in morality). For him, just as for the dogmatist, good is everything that is an object of the positive will (of volition), and highest good is an object of the absolute will, it is not determined by certain conditions of the subject, or by another empircally given will. Through the concept of duty, given to common human reason, the concept of the highest good acquires in him at least objective reality, which, while not a construction (as with the dogmatist), nevertheless acquires a definite meaning, not a generic one, but a real one. From the development of this concept it follows for him (as for the critical dogmatist) that all 132. “As I wish, so I command.” The passage, from Juvenal, Satires: VI, line 223, should read: “Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas” (“I wish it, so I command it; let my will be sufficient reason.”)

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material principles are unfit to ground morality, and that a merely formal principle in pure a priori reason (apart from all empirically given objects of the will) must be sought for this purpose. Discovering this principle and grounding the entirety of morality as a science on it, the skeptic proceeds in exactly the same way as the dogmatist. But in what concerns the exercise of morality, one cannot find the least difference between the dogmatist and the skeptic. Both strive for the highest good, according to their common conviction, [289/551] by a will good in itself. The real possibility of morality (not merely logically negative, grounded in the absence of contradiction, but rather positively determined through the concept of duty) has the same effect on the skeptic as it does on the dogmatist. Both find in human nature nothing greater, more sublime, whereby the individual as person is infinitely exalted over all other natural beings — over things [Sache] — than his receptivity to morality; which both the dogmatist and the skeptic seek to represent empirically in the only possible way, by absolute legality. As a historical fact preceding a philosophical culture, however, the skeptic explains the emergence of the demand for morality in the same way the psychologist tends to explain the origin of the love of money and honor. As a philosophical fact on the other hand (as it must be considered according to the preceding philosophical culture), he recognizes this demand as original. It is the same with aesthetic demands. Just as the rules of architecture, for example, can at first, in the absence of an aesthetic culture, be demanded merely as means to an end (convenience, and the like), and not be demanded in themselves, so nevertheless, they are considered according to a preceding culture as demands for good taste in itself. I go further and even claim that the internal conviction of the dignity of morality and its external representation by an absolute legality must be far easier for the skeptic, according to his own way of considering things, [290/552] than for the dogmatist. Think of a human being who has sufficiently reflected upon the vanity of all human ends and aspirations, so that what at first was considered as an end in itself, after more accurate knowledge is considered merely as a means to another end, and this in turn to another, etc., without a certain rule regarding the subordination of all these ends, and without a final purpose [letzten Endzweck]!133 He, by virtue of the acknowledged dignity of his nature as a rational being seeks 133. See Kant, third Critique, Appendix §84.

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to cultivate his (theoretical) reason through the sciences, and by pretending that greater progress should have been made in them, is tempted into making great efforts to be able to fully satisfy this drive unique to him as a rational being. But how he finds himself cheated! Everywhere, much is promised and little accomplished! The mathematical sciences, in spite of their certitude, evidence, and utility in human life in respect of knowing natural objects, are quite narrow, because they only consider these objects from the point of view of their quantity, as if they were mere quanta without any quality. The philosophical sciences deal merely with the form of the knowledge of objects in general, without effecting a cognition of a particular object. Natural science, if one takes what distinguishes it from philosophy and mathematics in order to cover its nakedness, is nothing more than a collection of one-sided observations and experiences, whose connection can be seen through arbitrary, contrary hypotheses, attempted in vain! [291/553] The practical sciences (medicine, politics, pedagogy, and the like), ach! How sad these seem! Not only are they based on theories, grounded in arbitrary, one-sided and erroneous hypotheses, but in addition they also lack the one thing by which they are supposed to be practical sciences. The physician, for example, is an anatomist, physiologist, pathologist, chemist, botanist, philosopher, poet, and God knows what else; only — not a physician! His unique subject is not a science grounded in definite rules, but rather something akin to animal instinct, which is weakened and misled by those manifold kinds of knowledge and the sciences. And what ought one finally say about the so-called historical sciences, from which one learns nothing more than that the very same human weaknesses, follies, and vices have taken place in other ages and in other countries among individuals whom we do not now observe; and that at that time the same means were used in vain, as they are still used now in similar cases even with the same results? In order therefore not to despair owing to this doubt, the skeptic investigates a purpose [Bestimmung] in human nature, which is peculiar to him as a rational being, different from other beings. To his great comfort he finds this purpose in reason itself, in the way it can be practically [morally] determined by the will, that is, in itself, without regard to some given end.134 134. Maimon’s point here is a staple of Kantian ethics: when reason, as opposed to our passions or inclinations, determines the will to act (that is, “practically”) the rational determination of the will produces a will good in itself, independent of

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The common human reason posits a law for the will, whose determining ground philosophical reason discovers in its [292/554] own form. Here he has a most enjoyable outlook. Reason, which in its theoretical uses is conditioned by given objects and therefore quite limited, is now absolute for him in its practical uses in relation to the will. The proposition that it posits is as certain in itself as it is incapable of inaccuracy in its application. To be sure, this most enjoyable outlook is greatly minimized by the skeptic, who doubts that law as an original fact. A comforting yet humbling voice calls to him: you may see the desired land from afar, but you may not enter! Fortunately, seeing and entering there do not matter: for those who boast about it can do nothing more than show that they are legitimated by the distant vision. The moral dogmatists and skeptics are therefore no more practically than theoretically distinguished from one another. Distinguishing them does not matter esoterically, but only to the exoteric presentation of morality.135

any particular results. Reason ensures the freedom of the will to determine itself, to be, in short, an end in itself. In Maimon’s argument, a skeptic may despair about reason’s capacity to know theoretical matters but will still be comforted by reason’s power in practical, moral matters. 135. The reason the distinction between moral dogmatists and skeptics matters exoterically is a result of the need to preserve faith in morality. For Maimon, morality primarily concerns community; hence, the need to preserve faith in its very existence, a faith that could be threatened were the esoteric truth to be exposed.

Letters to Herr Peina Y_Z First Letter

[30/557] Siegersdorf bei Freistadt, 3 Nov. 1799 I successfully received your letter of 27 Oct. along with the shirts, just as you will already have received mine from that date. One could almost conclude from the strange coincidence that our two letters, which presumably caused each other to be sent at the same time, suggests a harmony of spirits. But this much is certain, that neither of us possesses a prophetic spirit, or (which would be worse) are concerned with it. May I not repay you with a cold formulaic thanks. You know my feelings toward you. Friendship is no object of thanks. I would however like to express my heartfelt thanks to the amiable lady who kindly [31/558] undertook the task on my behalf. You need not go to any trouble to publish my writings, still less to turn to such a fox like **. Should I not get a publisher, my writings can still appear as oeuvres posthumes. If someone does everything in his power to become independent of others in respect of his provisional upkeep, but circumstances nonetheless prevent it, it is no more vile to be fed like a dog or a raven, following the example of Rabbi Jonathan.136 But, Gottlob, 136. [In a time of general famine, Rabbi Jonathan contacted Rabbi Judah the Holy, complier of the Mishnah, who was quite wealthy, and who preferred to be called 113

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[32/559] that’s not the case with me. From the way I’m fed, you can see that I’m not treated like a dog or a raven. — The position of the Mishnah: ancient earthfolk [alten Erdmenschen], which you suggest as a theme for an essay of mine, however, merit this treatment.137 But beforehand [before the essay mentioned above], you must be content with the following explanation. Earthfolk (idiots) are individuals who cannot rise above sensation.138 All their knowledge is based upon sense impressions and accidental associations of the power of imagination. Since the power of imagination depends in its operation on sensation, and sensation depends upon corporeal organization, it is natural that while this weakens among the elderly, the knowledge arising from it must also decrease. Students of wisdom, on the other hand, are those whose entire effort is [33/560] to rise above sensation in their knowledge and determination of the will, and to recognize a priori what pure understanding and pure reason can do. This operation, since it is independent of sensation (because it stands directly against it), is also independent of corporeal organization; it is even stronger, the weaker the activity of sense and the powers of imagination (which are opposed to it) is. The students of wisdom therefore always become wiser with age. Second Letter

Siegersdorf bei Freistadt, 5 Nov. 1799 You will have already received my letter of 3 November, answering yours of 27 October. I rush now to answer your last, of the 1st. There exists an absolute and a relative freedom of the will. The former is the power of the subject to determine the will against all motives that can be given through empirical objects. But the latter is the power to Rabbi when he supported the poor in times of famine. Rabbi Jonathan asked Rabbi Judah for assistance. To Rabbi Judah’s question — whether he studied the Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud — he answered: “no” (since Jewish law forbade making a profit from these studies). Rabbi Judah then asked him: “What should I do with you?” Rabbi Jonathan replied: “Feed me like a dog or a raven.”] 137. [The meaning of the Mishnah in this case is: the older individuals who are governed by their senses become, the more their powers of understanding diminish. — Students of wisdom, on the contrary, increase their powers of understanding every year.] 138. See n72.

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determine the will against all given motives by other, greater motives. The former is absolute freedom, which is only thought [gedacht] and [34/561] postulated by the moral law, but which cannot be known through anything; the divine greatness of the individual consists in this thought. The former idea is less a matter of degrees than of elevation. This latter is relative freedom (in relation to a given motive). It is not merely able to be thought, but rather able to be known and constitutes the human greatness of the individual, which, however, is obtained through practice, and allows different degrees, and is what my essay actually discusses. Conceive a Bonaparte. You declare him a great man; perhaps not because you assume that he must be determined for his great undertakings that have astonished the world by only the moral law, with peace and comfort in the back of his mind (for what entitles you to such an assumption? He could have been driven to this end by a higher degree of honor and fame); or he had merely been able to resist motives as powerful as peace and comfort by a motive that seems even more powerful to individuals of a higher cultivation. This greatness has degrees, which can be determined by the number and strength of the motives to be sacrificed, and which can be acquired through practice. [35/562] By the way, I don’t see how you find a contradiction here if I seek to try to answer the objection to this system that I have left unanswered in my Dictionary.139 I hope that the essay in Fichte’s journal, which I will send you as soon as I receive it, will satisfy you completely on this subject. Third Letter

Siegersdorf bei Freistadt, 17 May, 1800 You do me an injustice, dear friend, if you accuse me of having allowed your last letter to go unanswered. Your letter was in fact an answer to mine, and an answer, I think, need not be answered again! However, I like this unjust reproach, because I see from it that you are not indifferent to my letters, and that you are not like other so-called friends who are more concerned about receiving my letters than they are about writing me back. There is perhaps no one who likes to correspond with others as much in speech as in writing as I do; the only thing I request of the person with whom I am to correspond is that he set aside common prejudices attained 139. Maimon, Philosophisches Wörterbuch, GW III.

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through education, [36/563] custom, and example, and dares to submit to the test, and ascribes no more value to the lassitude of convenience than it deserves. An individual may even possess manifold capacities, powers, talents, taste, and science, but if he lacks courage, boldness, and determination, he is to me an average person with whom I may have nothing to do. I have therefore always avoided writing to a certain person who, regardless of his great understanding, cleverness, and refinement, did not sufficiently heed the sapere aude (dare to be wise, even at the risk of being considered as fool). — Originality, independence in thinking and acting, is what can be demanded of every individual without distinction. This does not mean, though, that every individual should strive to distinguish himself from the rest in all respects, but rather that he should be what he is (similar to others, or different from them) through himself. The director of the Theatre of the World has distributed roles expediently among individuals. He cannot do with a bloated cast (where several play the role a single person should play). Just as, on the one hand, contrary to originality, [37/564] the desire to imitate must be avoided, so too, on the other hand, must rigidity (the idea of one’s own manner of thinking and acting as the single correct one). The practical skeptic not only finds the application of the principles in particular cases quite uncertain, but also finds that the practical principles themselves are grounded in illusions, which, since they are unavoidable illusions, have a use. — Everyone plays his role as naturally as possible, but should not play it too naturally. One must never forget that it is merely a role one has assumed to play, otherwise he makes of the play something serious. The prompter serves, in my view, more to remind the actor that he merely has a role to play, than to recall his lines for him. If the latter has memorized his role well, he can do without the former; on the other hand, the more he rehearses the role, the more likely it is that he will consider what is a mere idea to be a reality; for example, instead of imagining King Lear’s frenzy, he wants to get into an actual frenzy himself. — Here, the practical skeptic represents the place of the prompter. — Fourth Letter

[38/565] Siegersdorf bei Freistadt, 20 October, 1800 Your acquaintance with Dr. Erhard, which, I hear, is making a stir in Berlin, must however be quite pleasant and instructive for you. An individual

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who, apart from his professional business, knows how to acquire the love and respect of educated, unprejudiced people of talent and insight, must understand something more than his profession, and must know how to conduct it without pedantry, but with genius and judgment. You request that I should share with you my idea about the Brownian system. Presumably, you are not requesting some short presentation of this system in itself, which you could acquire more correctly and completely from Dr. Erhard, as one initiated into these mysteries, than from me. Rather, you desire my judgment about the theoretical and practical value of this system, in comparison with the usual theory of this science. Here is the answer: 1. In a theoretical respect (scientific in form), none of these theories can, like the Brownian, stake a claim to the title of system [39/566] in the rigorous sense. All others lack the certainty and simplicity of the principles, which are necessary to a system in the rigorous sense. If then 2. the principles underlying that system were true (materialiter) in themselves, grounded in universal experience, and adequately explained all phenomena that this science had as its object, then this system, apart from being theoretically preferable to all others, would also be practically preferable. However, this is still contested; and just as the supporters of this system accuse its opponents of lacking a system, in the same way they, in turn, blame that system. The truth may therefore lie in the mean between both extremes, like Aristotelian virtue. As far as I’m concerned, I am convinced that, regardless of whether a being living or non-living is subject to the influence of external objects according to mechanical and chemical laws, nevertheless it is not on that account that it must be regarded as merely a mechanical and chemical being, but as one in which the effect [40/567] of the mechanical is subordinated to the organic, and this in turn is subordinated to animal laws. The vital process here goes through three instances, as it were, and is only decided in the highest instance. The conservation and increase of the vital power, through means known immediately from experience, which act directly upon it, is therefore the most correct, without completely disregarding the mechanical. The Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 18 v. 14, states: “A person’s spirit will endure its illness; but a broken spirit, who could bear it?”

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But here again it depends upon a conservation of an unspoiled inner sense or innate instinct, because otherwise the feeling of vital power, just like a false conscience, can also be deceptive. — Fifth Letter

Siegersdorf bei Freistadt in Schlesien, 7 Nov. 1800 You ask me about the reasons for my general dissatisfaction with Fichte. The reasons are very different according to different subjects [Fichte treats]. Lovers of truth (among whom I please to count myself) find his manner of philosophizing more subtle than thorough, more a game of the imagination than a methodical procedure of understanding and reason. Kantians cannot bear the thought that someone like Fichte will have elevated himself above Kant, and not only have understood him better than everyone, but also to have penetrated more deeply into the subject of inquiry than Kant himself. According to them, Kant must know everything, know everything better, and alone know everything. They consider the Kantian writings just like Mohammed II considered the Koran, setting the famous library at Alexandria on fire owing to the following dilemma: Either, he said, all these books contain nothing more than is contained in the Koran, and are therefore superfluous; or they contain things that are opposed to what is contained in the Koran. But then they are false and consequently also shameful! Theologians and politicians hold the Fichtean principles concerning religion and the state to be dangerous. Other poor devils are jealous of Fichte’s fame, or at least his reputation, and so on. I take this opportunity to note that I [42/569] find the envy itself, of course, completely natural; but when it does not turn into emulation, I find it bestial [thierisch]. The unpleasant feeling that arises from the idea of our own deficiency, in comparison with the excess of others, so that the feeling of deficiency increases by contrast, is natural, and cannot be restrained by anything. However, persistent brooding upon this idea, without doing anything that could alleviate the contrast, is the actual mistake of envy. But once the latter changes into emulation, that is, it applies the power to replace the deficiency and thereby to compensate for that contrast, it ceases to be a mistake, and becomes instead the bearer of all virtues. Envy does not always change into emulation. But, conversely, emulation always begins in envy. Individuals should of course love virtue

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itself, without which it cannot be pure virtue. However, they arrive late at this realization of the value of virtue itself, but seek to love it at first for other motives, until they gradually come to the realization of its intrinsic value. — The love of virtue itself also begins with envy. Everything that is possible [43/570] for others must be possible for themselves. But now I note that the inequality of natural gifts, especially because they are natural gifts, cannot be alleviated. No one can make himself taller by an inch! So there is nothing left for them but to strive to equal others in the use of free will (on which nature has placed no limits). They therefore place the highest value of the individual in the use of free will. They will become Stoics, or perhaps something better. — Here, I quote from Ecclesiastes chapter 4, v.4: “I saw that toil and skill in all things come from one’s envy of others,” etc. But enough about this! Herr Bendavid140 can clarify the Kantian argument against Fichte better to you in speech than I can in writing. In speech one says only as much as is necessary (according to the nature of the hearer), but in writing one says sometimes too much and sometimes too little. Should you have the chance to see Fichte, send him greetings from my genuine friendship for him (in spite of differing from him in his manner of philosophizing), which he deserves because of his great [44/571] acumen, his zeal for the cause of truth and virtue, and especially because of his free, open manner. Sixth Letter

Siegersdorf bei Freistadt in Schlesien, 10 Nov. 1800 The concern you express that I will attract enemies through my anti-faculty statements will certainly be satisfied. You know, friend, how little I fear the gentlemen of the faculty; and what I have stated with respect to medicine, I will claim against the entire faculty. All so-called medical sciences are simply auxiliary sciences to medicine, not medicine itself. Medicine is not a science, but rather an art for which the former are merely instruments. Medical genius and a practical power of judgment are actually what make the physician what he is. Far from it, then, that medicine, from this true point of view, should lose its prestige; it must instead increase in prestige 140. Lazarus Bendavid (1762–1832), a philosopher and mathematician in the circle of Kant.

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[45/572] among the thinking public, since, according to this, not everyone is qualified by a few years of university studies. This or that physician, [who despite his studies] could be called into question regarding his genius and natural vocation for this occupation, should lose some of his reputation as well. — And the thoughtless rabble do not even get this. They imagine that there are a certain number of human diseases, which, at first sight, are recognized by characteristics given in theory by the doctor who possesses that theory, and can be alleviated by the use of the remedies determined in this theory. So they do not allow themselves to be deprived of their faith in the omnipotence of the doctor. But since there’s no necessary connection between the doctor’s success and his degree of education, does the doctor have a natural vocation, or not? So you do your best, if you try to dispense entirely with the help of these gentlemen by means of a rational lifestyle. Diseases increase among individuals in the same relation as the belief in the medical profession increases. You [46/573] continually ruin your health, with the confidence that the doctor will make up for it, just as you continually sin with confidence in the priest’s absolution. Just as diseases make doctors necessary, so too are doctors the indirect cause of illness. But enough about this. Nothing will come of the essay you proposed. The thought is simple and allows no expansion through development and varied application. — Nevertheless, remind Herr **, to be so good as to have the essay concerning ** returned to me, since I sent it to him a half year ago. I don’t shake my essays out of my sleeve; they cost me in thinking. So I can’t leave them in unfamiliar hands.

Posthumous Writings

[44/575] The talented, original, and astute thinker, Salomon Maimon, died on 22 November 1800, in Nieder-Siegersdorf bei Freistadt in Schlesien, in the home of Herr Count von Kalckreuth, with whom he spent most of the last year. I can only specify his age [45/576] in an imprecise way: between 40 and 50 years, since in his very interesting Autobiography (two parts, Berlin, 1792, 1793), which he wrote himself, there is not a single account of years. He sent me the following essay some time ago for the Berlinische Monatsschrift, in which more of his treatises were published. The essay is clearly only a fragment, which he concluded with the words: “To be developed in future.” After the additions, it would have become a large book. As fragmentary as the whole piece is, and as haphazard as the connection of the individual parts is, the intellect of the person is surely recognizable in it. Since, moreover, it is perhaps one of the last of his essays edited for publication, I believe all the more, according to the deceased’s wishes, to have it sent here, since it is a part of his philosophical legacy. B.141

141. “B” is Johann Erich Biester, a friend and fellow philosopher in the Berlin circle of Enlightenment thinkers. 121

Sophistic of the Human Heart Y_Z Under the expression human heart, we understand the power of desire, in so far as it is determined by pleasant or unpleasant feelings, in contrast to the head, as the power of cognition, whose object is the relation of ideas [46/577] to one another, but not the feelings of the subject. That the power of cognition exposes sophistries (among which we understand all sorts of incorrect judgments — concerning the form or the matter), and thus can cause a sophistic (establishing these sophistries), is well known enough. But the fact that the power of desire, able to be determined by sensation [Empfindung], is subject to this evil is not so easy to see. In pure (unmixed with objective judgments) perceptions of the senses [sinnlichen Empfindungen], no sophistries (false judgments) arise, according to the well-known expression: “the senses don’t deceive (since they do not judge); but they probably do [deceive] in mixed sensations [vermischten Empfindungen] or feelings [Empfindnisse].142 — As long as sophistry is only connected with a sensation indirectly and accidentally, without producing it immediately, or modifying it in some way, and thereby determining the power of desire, it is always a sophistry of the head and 142. I have chosen different versions of the German Empfindung in order to avoid infelicitous expressions in English, e.g., “sensuous sensations (sinnlichen Empfindungen). “Sensation” is the standard rendering of Empfindung in translations of Kant; I therefore try to preserve it as often as possible, given Maimon’s Kantianism. Where I depart, the German will be included. 123

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not of the heart. Whoever, according to the sophistical proposition, “what seems to me to be, [47/578] is as it seems to me,” judges “that the line at whose beginning one is situated, converges in the end in an angle,” is in fact committing a sophistry. This however has no immediate influence on the power of desire. A converging line is neither more pleasant or unpleasant to him than a parallel line, unless a particular interest is connected with one or the other, so that the power of imagination, according the laws of the association of ideas, transfers the idea of satisfaction from the end to the means. — Even the most sublime feelings, as, for example, the love of truth and justice, are not produced immediately by the pure idea of truth and justice, but are instead produced by means of other ideas directly related to the feeling. However, the construction or first instance of the truth, owing to the active powers of cognition, is connected with a pleasant feeling. But the subsequent idea is indifferent, if there is no interest in its use. It is the same with justice. The judgment that something is just does not immediately [48/579] produce a feeling for justice. Compare what happens in the mind of the judge or spectator of an unjust action with what happens in the mind of the person offended by the unjust action. The former disapproves of the unjust action, but remains indifferent toward it. The latter on the other hand does not merely disapprove, but is also affected by it. Zeal for matters of truth and virtue always reveal an impure source. A holy zeal is in fact quite unholy, when it is not a role assumed in order to achieve an end more securely. One truth is not more truth than another. Nor is it more truth for one person than for another. So when the pleasant feeling associated with one truth is elevated to the level of an affect, but the pleasant feeling associated with another is not; or if the feeling of the same truth becomes an affect in one person but not in another; the reason for this must be sought elsewhere than in the diversity of the feeling for truth itself. It all depends on the degree of conviction. The more truths a given truth agrees with [49/580] in the subject, the greater the conviction in favor of that truth.143 Objectively, a single demonstration is sufficient to confirm 143. Cf. Francis Bacon, New Organon I. xlvi: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” Maimon wrote on Bacon’s philosophy, and edited a German edition of Bacon’s New Organon, in which this passage appears.

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a truth. Retrospective demonstrations do not increase the truth, but only the conviction of the subject about it, since each new demonstration represents a new connection of the subject with other truths. It also depends on the way one reaches a truth: the more difficult it was for the subject to acquire it, and the more diligence and skill it cost him, the greater the pleasant feeling connected to it. Finally, truth is not always merely an end in itself, but is also valued as a means to other ends. The more, and the more important, the ends the subject hopes to reach through a given truth, the greater the anticipated pleasurable feeling from it. This is exactly the case with virtue. The feeling associated with it (respect) is not an empirical feeling that precedes virtue as a motive, but rather a feeling brought about through freedom by the subject itself that therefore cannot [50/581] and must not be elevated to an emotion, since what is characteristic of every emotion in general is a privation of freedom. — The relentless striving to expand and perfect knowledge and to exercise virtue can therefore be without emotion; even being affected by it stands in the way of that aspiration. Indifference is something entirely other than being without emotion. The man of the world who follows his plan without emotion is however not indifferent in respect to it. The test for the intellectual and moral feeling for truth and virtue must be administered like a gold assay. In order to obtain the quantity of the pure gold and determine its specific content, it is necessary first of all to separate the gold processed into a work from the additive with which the gold worker, from his own interest, has falsified the gold. Second, it is also necessary to separate out the additive that is indispensable to the interest of the work itself, without which the gold cannot be processed into a work. Similarly, in order to preserve a pure feeling [Gefühl] for truth and virtue [51/582], the additive arising from feelings [Gefühle] mixed into the affect [Affekte], must first be separated from the fact that truth and virtue are presented as means for any purpose, thereby falsifying the pure sense of truth and virtue. Second, there is also the additive which, although separate from the pure parts according to concepts, is necessarily connected to the same presentation. So, for example, the feeling of injury, which is inflicted on the subject in a peculiar way or even shared with others, must first be separated from the mixed feelings or affects stemming from an injustice. Second, since justice is a universal necessity of every individual toward all others, every injustice is unexpected, and therefore connected with

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the feeling of shock, which the given feeling reinforces on aesthetic grounds. It is only when all of these separations are made that the true content of the pure feeling for virtue can fully arise. — It is not worth the effort to speak about gross deceptions and distortions, whereby the feeling for virtue is subordinated to other feelings; for example, when someone [52/583] is in favor of particular virtues and against particular vices: the old matron, in favor of chastity and against lasciviousness; the miser, against waste, and the like. These can be uncovered with little attention and easy effort in each given instance and can be represented in their nakedness. The nature of emotions and passions has still not been sufficiently investigated. They entail a greater quantity and diversity of ideas than one customarily believes, and owe their emergence to completely heterogeneous principles. The following investigation will show, first, that in every affect or every passion all powers of the mind are at work, and therefore entail not only differing, but also heterogeneous and even opposed ideas. For every one of these emotions 1) the content, that is, all the ideas which can be conceived in it, and 2) the way they emerge, namely, how these ideas could have been connected into a whole, can be specified. The content in turn is shown a) in the subject, b) in the object, and c) in the interaction [53/584] between them. The way they emerge will be grouped into a) the logical, b) the psychological, and c) the moral. It can be shown further that the emotions are based on ideas peculiar to human beings and their dignity, which are however misunderstood and misused by individuals at the very beginning of their education, and that, although the emergence of these ideas is inevitable, their harmful influence can be reduced gradually by expanding and perfecting knowledge, and by strength of will. Before I proceed, however, I must first determine the exact object of the investigation. It concerns the origin of moral good and evil. However, I do not mean here that what is morally good is the determination of the will by the moral law, and what is morally evil is the determination of the will contrary to the moral law. These have no origin other than absolute freedom, or the equally possible determination of the will in the former or the latter way; and with this the entire investigation would end. Instead, among [54/585] moral goods I mean only what is in accordance with reason in general (even theoretically conditional reason); and among moral evils only a will contrary to reason. A will can however not be evil or contrary to reason in respect of ends, since (theoretical)

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reason in fact has nothing to do with ends. These are determined every time by knowledge of the causes of pleasant sensations. Nor in respect of the means: that one wants improper means betrays only a lack of knowledge, but not an evil will. Rather, it [the will] can be evil in itself by the fact that the subject, while recognizing the general principle of causality (the principle of sufficient reason), nevertheless strives against it in determining the will.

Origin of Moral Good and Evil Y_Z The question about the origin of moral good and evil must be taken in the same sense as the question about the origin of our knowledge, where we are not concerned with determining a substance as its cause, nor even our capacity for knowledge [55/586] itself as a force — that is, as the substance and cause of our knowledge. That force is thought only as a logical subject. The task concerns merely the original ideas (not derived from another) as the first component of our knowledge; their relation to one another; and the laws according to which they must be connected to knowledge of objects. Answering that impossible question, assuming it would be possible, not only does nothing to answer ours: for assuming that we take a being endowed with an infinite power of knowledge as cause of our knowledge, the latter question [concerning the origin of our knowledge] always still remains unanswered even in respect of this being; but rather, even with a completely satisfactory answer to the latter question, it turns out that the first is completely unanswerable. It is mainly our concern to know our faculty of knowledge exactly, in order to expand and perfect all other knowledge through this knowledge, which cannot be accomplished through knowledge of some object or other. Even so, the question concerning [56/587] the cause of moral good and evil in human nature, if its answer is to be practical, in no way means: specifying a single Being (just like Leibniz in his Theodicy, according to a metaphysical theology), or two beings (like Bayle is inclined to assume in 129

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accordance with the Manicheans), as actual or agent cause of moral good and evil. This does not bring us one step closer to our moral improvement. Rather, the task is: after a higher investigation concerning the moral nature of humanity, to make it comprehensible how the power of desire, which by its very nature always has the good as its object, can sometimes choose evil? For it is said that in these cases evil has the appearance of the good. But where does this inevitable appearance come from? For it must be inevitable, since otherwise the subject as a rational being that has the true good for an object, would avoid it. The origin of this appearance is now to be uncovered, and, as far as this appearance is concerned, its effect destroyed. One therefore sees that this question belongs as little [57/588] before the judgment seat of a rational [razionalen] theology as before an irrational (positive) theology, but rather belongs before a pragmatic anthropology. Now everything must be derived from the idea of the absolute freedom of the will, in contrast with the idea of natural necessity; and here, God comes into play as little as the devil. It must be shown that the origin of the moral good in the deepest sense (which means both what makes an individual morally good and worthy of happiness, and what makes his free action genuinely a part of happiness), is to be sought in the agreement of the idea of absolute freedom with the idea of necessity according to laws of nature (since the individual properly determines the limits of the use of each of these ideas); just as the origin of moral evil (also in the deepest sense) is to be sought in the contrast between both these ideas (by extending one or the other beyond the respective limits of their use).

The Origin of Human Folly Y_Z [58/589] “See! The silver has its mines; gold, places from which it is (later) purified. But where can wisdom be found: and whence does wisdom come? Job, ch. 28, v. 1, 12, 20. — In Job’s time, this question may have been quite fitting. In our time, on the other hand, at the end of the eighteenth century, it could be changed in this way: “See, etc., But where does foolishness [Thorheit] come from? From where folly? [Narrheit] — In our times, the bases of human knowledge have been examined so deeply and so much has been established, that in this respect there seems nothing left to wish for. The stock of knowledge already expanded has grown to an incalculable size and variety. One should believe that praxis goes hand in hand with theory; that wisdom and cleverness must stand in the same relation with perfection and extension of knowledge, but foolishness and folly in inverse relation: and yet experience, unfortunately, does not correspond to this! People are inclined to derive practical defects and errors from theoretical ones. [59/590] But it is overlooked that these theoretical errors are themselves, in view of their activity, practical. Logic merely provides the causa formalis of errors and delusions, the ground of their possibility, but not the causa realis, the ground of their origination. Since logic establishes the way in which an error is possible, no one is forced to commit it. — The origin of errors is also sought from the influence of the lower powers of knowledge (sensation and imagination), from 131

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prejudice, inclination, and passion. But it is not noticed that the errors are in fact tacitly admitted to be practical, which is to say they are produced by the will, and can be destroyed by it. For what are inclinations and passions? They make you want the error that suits you, instead of the truth that opposes you. What are prejudices? That judgments that happen to have arisen without self-activity and an effort of the faculty of cognition and have become habitual, are better followed out of convenience than changed by self-activity and effort. [60/591] How does the power of imagination become the strongest influence in determining objective knowledge? Because a free play (agitatio, not an actio mentis aimed at objective knowledge) of the power of imagination is easier and to that extent more pleasant than the difficult work of understanding and reason. — All errors of knowledge are consequently, in respect of their origin and their actual existence, errors of the will. Thus, the explanation sought after for the actuality of practical defects and errors turns in a circle; they are there because they are there! But it is also true that, on the other hand, all practical defects and errors are, according to their possibility, theoretical. The particular insight of this mutual influence of knowledge and will on each other is of the utmost significance. One must seek to define in general the concepts of foolishness and folly, which linguistic usage has made imprecise; to indicate precisely their logical (formal), psychological (real), and moral (existing) grounds; to establish the emotions as special kinds of those classes of concepts [61/592] and in this way, as it were, to construct them. It will follow that these errors of the mind (somewhat like the pox) are inevitable for every human being before the complete development of their minds, but that afterwards it is in their power to get rid of them. Explanation

Folly [Thorheit] is willing something as an end in itself that can only be willed as a means to an end. Foolishness [Narrheit] is to desire something that cannot be obtained as an end without means, without wishing to obtain the use of means. The miser, e.g., is not a fool [Narr], but rather commits folly [Thor]. For he uses the means to obtain his imagined end (collecting and hoarding money) which, however, cannot be willed as an end in itself, but merely as means to any end. But even a miser is foolish only at the outset, because

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later what he first imagines becomes an actual end for him: [62/593] he’d rather have the money than do anything with it. The envious person on the other hand is a fool. He wants to maintain his end of being equal to others in respect of certain advantages without the use of means (since he would otherwise not envy, but emulate). Logical Cause of Foolishness and Folly

It would sound pedantic to establish these paralogisms here in forma. It suffices to note that the cause of folly is based in the confusion of different kinds of absolutes with one another. For it is clearly true that what is willed as a means to an end is also willed absolutely; that is, if all objects of the will are divided in general into two classes, those objects of the will that are ends in themselves and those that are means to an end, if one then abstracts from the conditional, the latter are no less objects of the will in general than the former. The following is now substituted for this proposition: What is merely an object of the will as means to an end [63/594] is also an object of the will as an end in itself, which entails an obvious contradiction. Foolishness is based upon a similar confusion of two different meanings of the word “will.” First, will in the broadest sense means nothing more than a mere judgment that an object is good for the subject, as a mere wish [Wunsch] to acquire the object, without seeing whether the acquisition itself is possible or impossible according to the laws of nature. Thus it is sometimes said: “I wish [will] to eat, drink,” etc.; instead of saying, “I am hungry,” “thirsty,” etc. This will is never unreasonable, because it abstracts from the possible acquisition of the object. Ends for which there are no means, or those whose acquisition at least cannot occur at the same time, are nevertheless objects of the will in this sense. — In a stricter sense however will is not merely wishing to attain an object, but rather deciding on the use of means, and marshalling all forces for this. This will is rational, if the subject knows the means, [64/595] and uses them appropriately. In the opposite case it is irrational. In such a case, the will in the first sense is only an incoherent force that does not strive to act against the obstacles, and is therefore not consumed with this striving and does not consume itself; rather, if the obstacles are overcome, it can then act undiminished as a living force. The authentic will however is a living force, which here, since it does not suffice to alleviate the obstacles, fruitlessly consumes itself.

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A child has at the outset no will other than that in the first sense. It feels needs, and demands their satisfaction, which it recognizes through “mine.” These needs are met by others. The child notes this; and now begins to use his idea of what is “mine,” which so far he himself has mechanically produced, intentionally, as a means, and if this is not enough, also screams. He convenes a permanent lit de justice, until he gradually learns to achieve his purposes by other means, if he does not want always to get caught.144 But this childish inclination to immediately satisfy the will remains even [65/596] in the adult, who recognizes it as foolish, as we will soon see from the analysis of the affects. Children, and often even adults, tend to confuse willing with wishing or desiring. Yet the two are not only different, but also in a certain respect opposed to one another. Wishing and desiring have the end, the will has the means to the object. Someone wishes or desires a pleasure; he wills the actions that lead to it. No one says, for example, I will, but rather I wish to be wealthy. Instead, one says: I will to invest my capital (in order to become wealthy) in this or that way, etc. One wills precisely what one neither wishes for nor desires. As paradoxical as this sounds, it is true. Tedious actions and undertakings, which are certainly not objects of the power of desire in itself, are nevertheless willed as a means to obtaining the objects of the power of desire in itself. The will gives nothing (not allowing its forces to be wasted in a useless way), and does not ask for anything (not obtaining an end without [66/597] the use of forces required as a means do to so). The will is cold, since the attention of the subject is always on what is next, which is the furthest from the end. — On the other hand, desire can escalate from a mere wish to a violent longing. The less the subject can or will contribute to the acquisition of objects, the more violent will be the subject’s longing for them, as is wonderfully observed in children. In this state, the subject acts on itself inappropriately [zweckwidrig], but purposively [zweckmäßig] toward objects external to itself. The longing becomes therefore more unpleasant; and even stirs the unpleasant sensation associated with every affect, since every affect is associated with a violent longing (to obtain or be rid of something). In the affective state, the subject is like a shore-bound sea, whose waves, after being driven ashore by the wind, crash back, broken. 144. Lit de justice, literally, “bed of justice,” was a special session of the French parliament headed by the king, where royal edicts were registered.

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The subject’s adverse reaction to itself is the basis of all foolishness. It is quite incorrect to believe [67/598] that foolishness consists merely in the privation of prudence; and, since prudence is based upon knowledge (of the relationship of objects as means and ends), foolishness is based upon the lack of this knowledge. Experience creates prudence; a lack of experience creates naivety (imprudence). But the naïve person is not as a result a fool. Foolishness is not a failure of knowledge, but rather of the will; and in itself, just like prudence, is also something positive, although opposed to prudence. Consider genuine so-called fools in a madhouse. Are they merely imprudent? All human beings sin more or less against the principle of sufficient reason. Not because they do not recognize it as a universal proposition, nor because they lack the experience to use it properly (this would not be a sin against the principle itself), but because they recognize it as a universal proposition, and nonetheless strive to withdraw the objects of their desires from it. All human beings are therefore more or less fools! Just as the idea of absolute freedom, as a postulate of pure (practical) reason a priori, is the basis of all wisdom if [68/599] it remains within the limits of its use, transgressing these limits is the basis of all folly, and is thought to be empirically representable: namely, when the will is not only determined to be not necessary by nature (a natural motive), but is itself thought to determine (not merely intended to determine) nature. From this arises the truth of the poet’s saying: “Fools are not wise, and the wise are not clever!”145

145. Possibly an allusion to Proverbs 14:7–31.

On the Emotions in General Y_Z 1. General explanation. Emotions are heightened (pleasant or unpleasant) feelings intensified by ideas of reason, understanding, and imagination, concerning the effect of external objects, associated with an impatient striving (not waiting for the use of means) either to intensify and maintain these heightened feelings (if they are pleasant), or to weaken and get rid of them (if they are unpleasant). Representations of reason (ideas) and of the understanding (concepts) cannot immediately [69/600] heighten or otherwise modify the feelings caused by an outside impression; but they can do so by means of a sensual schema. Thus, e.g., the feeling of an insult inflicted is in itself nothing more than the feeling of the evil inflicted: the pain I feel from a stone deliberately thrown is in itself no greater than the one I would feel if the wind blows the stone with equal power in the same direction, etc. And yet the subject, when it is offended, feels more than the evil inflicted. This is because an insult, as a voluntary act contrary to the generally accepted laws of justice, is unexpected, and therefore, when it happens, surprising. What is unexpected and surprising in this feeling therefore intensifies into the feeling of anger, making it seem as if an unjust pain were more pain than pain. 2. The vis inertia of emotion. Each body is, as laws of nature show, endowed with a vis inertia or torpor, which compasses more than laziness. By virtue [70/601] of the latter, a body would only resist movement 137

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when it was at rest and would persist at rest until an external cause set it in motion. If on the other hand it is in motion, it would not resist rest, but would gradually move to it by itself. However, by virtue of inertia it resists rest when it is in motion as well as motion when it is at rest; it strives to remain in the state where it was set until an external cause forces it to change. This also occurs in human minds. Some people are hard-working, and others are lazy; by contrast, all are subject to inertia. The person who once entered into action (by some motive), can move himself toward rest (without an interfering motive) as little as a person at rest can put himself to action. Both betray an equal lack of self-determination of the will, which is not given in any experience, and yet is postulated for the sake of morality. As far as we know from experience, the mind is endowed with a vis inertia. But the reason individuals unconditionally praise action [602/71] yet blame laziness lies in the fact that neither are judged in themselves, but in view of their causes and consequences. The active individual reveals certain perfections (diverse and higher drives and needs, which are grounded in turn in higher insights and feelings), which lazy individuals lack. The former are useful by their activity; the latter are not. The moral worth of both, on the contrary, is the same. Activity that is not self-activity has as little moral worth as laziness; and spontaneous laziness (voluntary resistance to the given motives to activity), if I must express myself so, even has moral worth as self-activity. The mill wheel is clearly as useful when it is moved by the force of a storm as when it remains at rest from lack of this force. In itself, however, it is no worse in the latter state than in the former. Had the mill wheel in addition the power to set itself in motion or rest independently of the storm, it would again have an equal value in the two states it produced by itself. [72/603] This vis inertia is particularly visible in the affects and passions. And what is most noteworthy is that as soon as we become aware of the negative part of the body (resistance to motion in the state of rest), we become more easily aware of the positive part of inertia (resistance to rest in the state of motion). The reason for this is that what the affects initially accomplish is infinitely small, and gradually becomes reinforced to a certain degree by habit. This habit causes a proportionate easing of the affect, and a proportionate difficulty in getting rid of it, if one acquires it; it cannot be brought about in any way other than by an opposite habit (a weaning [Abgewöhnung]). The effect of habit however is not physical,

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but psychological; it therefore does not arise in bodies, but rather merely in modifications of the mind. 3. Distinction between the emotions in human beings and animals. That the emotions of human beings are something entirely different than the analogous ones [73/604] we perceive in other living beings is a remark that would not need to be made if people were not so inclined to transfer their own affections to everything where they discover only the most remote resemblance to themselves; but precisely because they are completely transferred, they do not, in fact, arise from themselves. Some emotions (for example, shame) absolutely do not occur in animals; others (for example, rage) share only a faint similarity. Even linguistic usage does not allow such heterogeneous things to be confused. Who for example would say about an animal: it is enraged, it is falling in love, and so forth? In human wrath or human love, ideas an animal in fact cannot have are ingredient; namely, apart from animal feelings, ideas of the higher powers of knowledge. But even animal feelings, according to the diversity of organization, are very different even with expressly the same impressions on the same sense (according to our meaning). It isn’t worth the effort to change the mind of someone who imagines that an elephant, [74/605] an earthworm, and an oyster have the same kind of feelings of hunger or sex drive. 4. Origin of the emotions. The emotions, as different kinds of weaknesses of the human intellect, do not arise accidentally, like bodily illnesses and afflictions; rather, their cause is in the essence of the human intellect, in its basic powers [Grundvermögen], and in the way these develop. They are therefore, as it were, innate to human beings. They have their formal cause (the way they are possible) in the higher powers of knowledge, their efficient cause [Realgrund] (the way they become actualized in the mind) in the lower powers of knowledge, and the cause of their continued or canceled effectiveness in the will. They all reveal a permanent conflict between the universal demands of the theoretical (effective knowledge of the object) powers of knowledge and the practical (will-determining) powers of knowledge in one and the same intellectual expression. The emotions contain the coarsest misunderstandings, the most striking contradictions, and the strangest [75/606] deceptions, of which the individual can, and indeed must be, warned, in view of the nature of the will, before his power of knowledge develops; if we did not owe their origin to earliest childhood, and were not their power reinforced through long custom, we

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could never acquire them. In one and the same affect, the object inducing the affect is presented as a being acting with absolute freedom (independence from natural necessity according to laws of causality); the subject, on the other hand, decides to counteract the principle of sufficient reason, and strives with such ferocity to maintain its intended purpose that it becomes impatient with the proper use of the means (again, contrary to that proposition), and finally becomes dissatisfied with itself because of its foolish intentions. 5. Classification and ordering of the emotions. They can be ordered into classes according to different grounds of classification: a) according to the degree of their affinity with one another, e.g., rage and vengeance, shame and fear; b) according to the degree of ease of transition from one to another, e.g., from pride to rage; c) according to their degree of proximity to the rational or animal nature of human beings. Thus, one finds avarice, envy, and resentment having almost an entirely animal nature; rage, shame, and high-mindedness having more of the rational nature. — For my project, the latter division and classification is the most important. For the intention of the entire investigation is to show how these mental weaknesses, which are peculiar to human beings, arise (by various means) from the rational nature peculiar to them.

APPENDIX

“On Salomon Maimon and his Final Hours”146

In the previously mentioned monthly Kronos, an Archive of the Times, there is an interesting article by Fr. Tscheggey in Freistadt with the title: “On Salomon Maimon and his Final Hours,” from which I dug up the following — both because these observations deserve to be better known than they might be, and also because they belong here, and may therefore conclude this writing. About 1795, Pastor Tscheggey made Maimon’s acquaintance in Freistadt, but closer contact with him began six weeks before his death, at 146. This text, originally published in Kronos: einem Archiv der Zeit I (1801), appears at the end of the compilation Maimoniana: Oder Rhapsodien zur Charakteristik Salomon Maimons (Berlin, 1813). It is introduced by Sabattia Joseph Wolff, who compiled Maimoniana from an anonymous source. As Abraham Socher notes (The Radical Enlightenment of Salomon Maimon [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006], 50, n.13), this account of Maimon’s final days is powerfully reminiscent of Boswell’s account of a deathbed conversation with David Hume. After asking Hume whether he believed in a “future state,” Hume replied “that it was possible that a piece of coal put on the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for­ever.” See James Boswell, An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq., in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 98–99. 141

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which time Maimon visited Tscheggey almost twice a week. The rest of what most interests us here we want to hear from the preacher himself: A few days after he lay down, I heard of his illness; I soon visited him and found him in bed. The great weakness that would not allow him to walk across the room made me immediately concerned about his condition, and I urged him to consult a doctor. But he was no friend of hypotheses in any science, least of all where life and death are at stake, and he therefore had no confidence in medicine. After a few days I came again, and found him already prepared for death. I found it interesting, from a psychological point of view, to observe whether in this situation he would remain true to his principles even in this dangerous condition. So, as I approached his bed, I began to feel that the following conversation, which I record word for word, would relax him: I: “Today I find you in rather bad shape, my dear Maimon.” He: “It will get better.” I: “I find you in such bad shape that I doubt whether you’ll rise.” He: “What’s next, when I’m dead, I’m gone.” I: “How can you say that, dear friend? How?” (I said this with much intimacy). “Your spirit, which rose under the most unfortunate circumstances, which bore such beautiful flowers and fruits, how should this spirit, clothed in the miserable shell in which you now see yourself, be kicked into the dust? Should you not feel in this moment that there is something in you that is not corporeal — not matter — not subject to the conditions of space and time?” He: “Ach! Those are beautiful dreams and hopes…” I: (it quickly came to mind) “…which will surely come true. You recently claimed,” I continued after a short pause, “that here things are only subject to legality; assuming this, perhaps you will ascend to the level of morality, since you and we all have an investment in it.147 How not? Should you not wish to join the company of Mendelssohn, who was so honored by you?” — (I diligently gave my conversations this turn, to touch this side of his heart, too). 147. “Here” refers to “this life,” that always falls short of perfect morals, and remains on the plane of law-abidingness. The “next life” is by contrast the realm of morality.

On Salomon Maimon and his Final Hours

143

He: (after a while): “Ach, I have been a great man among the greatest of the great — and how much I wish it were otherwise.”148 I: “This admission is proof that you’re still not entirely convinced of your unbelief. No, (I took him by the hand), you will not completely die — your spirit will surely continue.” He: “I can believe and hope much, but what help is that?” I: “It helps bring peace.” He: “I am at peace” — he said, quite exhausted. I broke off the conversation, since he could scarcely speak anymore. When I wanted to leave, he asked me to stay, or to come back soon. When I came the following morning, I found him already speechless and unconscious. Around ten in the evening he closed his expressive eyes for good. Perhaps he could have been saved if he had consulted a doctor sooner, and had followed the rules for the prescriptions. He died calmly — but I dare not say what this calmness was the result of. A few days later, as I walked past the Count’s manor, I wistfully considered the windows of his former room, and blessed his ashes.149

148. Maimon’s remark is curious, both self-affirming and self-effacing. Perhaps he intends, in response to Tscheggey, to indicate that he will miss the company of the great upon death, since in his view there is no afterlife, a fact he wishes were otherwise. 149. Count von Kalckreuth (1766–1830), a young Silesian nobleman, at whose estate in Siegersdorf Maimon spent his final years.

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Index

A A priori judgments, 10–11, 11n26, 11n28, 135, 66–67, 33, 90, 105–14 as criterion in philosophy, 67 in mathematics, 107 and Mosaic God, 90 quid juris and quid facti, 11, 11n28 synthetic, 10–11, 11n26 Absolute freedom, 27, 36, 43, 68, 71, 73, 115, 126, 130, 135 Abstraction, acts of, 30, 95–97 Accidental determinations, 33, 47, 107, 114, 123 and categorical imperative, 64–65 and emotions, 47, 139 of the will, 70 Acosmism, 6, 12, 51, 148 Activity, morality and, 138 Advice as hypothetical imperative, 102–3 Aesthetics, 110

relation to Great Personage 25–26, 25n57, 78–82 See also Naturgabe/gifts of nature Affect. See Emotions al-Farabi, 8 Alcoholism, Maimon’s, 6–7 Algebra, 8–9 Am ha-aretz, 35n72 See also Erdmenschen Ancient earthfolk, 114, 114n137 See also Erdmenschen Ancient philosophy, 54–55 Angel of darkness, 100–101 Angel of light, 100–101 Anger, 46, 137 Animal drives, 23, 38, 39, 64 Animal emotion, 47–48, 139–40 Animal laws, 38, 117 Animal life, perfection and, 72 Animal volition, 106 See also Arbitrium brutum Anthropology, 29–31, 93–97, 130. See also Rousseau 151

152 Anthropomorphism, 27, 89–90. See also God, patriarchal Anti-dualist philosophies, 12–13 Apiqoros, Apiqorsut as heresy, 1–4, 8 and modern Jewish thinkers, 52–55 Appearance of greatness, 75, 77–79 of moral good, 130 Appetites. See Yetzer ha-ra Aquinas, Thomas, 3n6 Arabic Aristotelian scholars, 9 Arabic language, 9 Arbitrium brutum, 106 Archimedes, 83 Architecture, 110 Arendt, Hannah, 4 4n11, 52, 53n94 See also Jewish identity, Assimilation Aristotelianism, radical, 8, 49 Aristotle, 7, 12n30, 19, 107n30, 54 Aristotelian mean, 38, 117 concept of greatness, 25, 28, 75n106 formal and efficient causes, 47 form-matter distinction, 11n28 and happiness, 24 and intellectualism, 35 and Maimonides, 8, 9, 15n38, 24, 49 natural laws, 38 possibility and actuality, 106n128 subordination of moral to intellectual, 15n38 and will, 44–45, 45n84 Works: Categories, 7 Metaphysics, 12n30, 106n128 Nicomachean Ethics, 15n38,

Index 45n84, 107n130 Assimilation, Jewish, 4, 10, 52–53 Association of ideas, law of, 81–82, 94, 108–9, 124 See also Imagination Autobiography (literary genre) Maimon’s influence on, 52–53, 52n93 Autobiography, Maimon’s, 1n1, 1n2, 2–7, 3n4, 3n5, 5n13, 6n14–16, 7n23, 9, 9n19, 9n21, 10n25, 14–15, 14n35–37, 23, 27–28, 28n61–64, 40n77, 42, 42n80, 51n92, 52–54, 121 Averroes, 8 Avi’ezer. See Guenzberg, Mordechai Aaron Axioms, of mathematics, 69n105, 107 B Bacon, Francis New Organon, 7, 124n143 Bava Batra, 8a, 49n71 See also Mishnah Bayle, Pierre, 129–30 Begehrungsvermögen. See Power of desire. Ben Joshua, Shelomo, 3n6, 5 See Maimon, Salomon Bendavid, Lazarus, 119, 119n140 Benjamin, Walter, 53–54, 54n96 Maimon’s influence on, 53–54, 54n96 Berdichevsky, Micha Yosef influence of Maimon on, 51–52 Berlin, 1–4, 6–7, 52, 116, 121n141 Haskalah in, 1–4, 6–7, 52 Jewish quarter, 2, 6 Rosenthaler Gate, 2, 6 Berlinische Monatsschrift, xi, 4n8, 41,

Index Berlinische Monatsschrift (continued) 80n110, 121 Bernfeld, Simon, 52 Biblical commentary, 8 Biester, Johann Erich, 41, 41n78, 121n141 Body and emotion, 48, 139 and greatness, 78 and morality, 27, 47 perfection of, 27 and soul, 11, 26 transcendence of, 35–36 See also Medicine; Sensation Bonaparte, Napoleon, 33, 36, 115 Book of Knowledge. See Maimonides, Moses Breslau, 7 Brown, Robert, 37n75 Brownian Motion, 37n75 Brownian System, 37, 37n75, 38 C Cancellation of drives by other drives, 64–65 of external by internal motives, 69–70 of virtue by itself (virtue), 65–66 Categorical Imperative, 16–17, 19, 22, 31–33, 63–64 Causality, principle of, 127, 140 See also Principle of sufficient reason Chemical laws, 38, 117 Christianity, Maimon’s attempted conversion to 6–7, 6n16 Civilization, state of, 33, 91, 107 Cognition, 10–12, 14–15, 17–19, 17n41, 33, 41, 59, 72, 76, 81, 84, 86–87, 103, 105, 109, 111,123–24, 132, 148

153

drive for, 17–19 objects of, 11n28, 12, 86 power of, 15, 19, 33, 41, 72, 84, 105, 109, 123 Cognitive powers, higher and lower, 47, 73 Commanding, act of, 99n123, 102–3 and hypothetical and categorical imperatives, 103 Common human understanding, 18, 22–23, 63–65, 102, 107 as prone to error, 22–23, 63–65 Conatus in Maimon’s concept of drive, 22, 60 See also Drive; Spinoza Conscious pariah, Jew as 52–53 See also Arendt, Hannah, and Jewish Identity D David (son of Maimon), 7 Death, of Maimon, 7–8, 141–43 Delusion, 22, 26, 44, 84n114, 84–86, 131. See also Mental illness Desire as consciousness of striving, 22 to emulate virtue 39–40 and foolishness, 45, 134 power of. See Power of desire Desiring as distinct from willing, 132, 134 Dessau, 7 Determination, of the will. See Will, determination of Dichotomies. See Dualism Dignity, human, 32, 101, 110 Discipline, culture of, 39 Disposition, moral, 32, 100

154

Index

Divine intellect, 5–6, 9, 13, 19 Divine limitation. See Tzimtzum Divine name, Maimon’s use of, 27, 89–91 and future tense, 27, 90, 90n116, 91 See also Jehova Divinity as absolute freedom, 36, 90 striving after, 15 Dogmatist(s), moral, 31–34, 99–101, 106–12 Dor Tahapukot, Maimon’s depiction in, 52 Dov Ber of Mezeritch. See Maggid of Mezricht Drive, 17–19, 22–25, 32–33, 38–39, 60, 64–65, 67, 71–74, 83, 95, 111, 115, 134, 138–39 natural, 22–25, 33, 38–39, 64 and pleasure, 17–18, 22, 24–25, 64–65, 67, 74 rational, 23–24, 64–65 toward cognition, 17–19 Dualism in Kantian philosopy, 11–13, 16, 49 Duty, 16, 18–19, 22–24, 26, 27n30, 32, 49, 63, 66, 76, 86, 100, 109–10 as consequent to virtue, 22–24, 63, 66 for moral dogmatist and skeptic, 32, 100 and rational law, 23, 66 universal validity of, 19 E Eastern Europe, 51 Ecclesiastes 4:4, 39–40, 119. See also Yetzer ha-ra

Eliot, George, 54, 54n98 Emotions, 7, 21, 38, 46, 55–57, 59, 60–63, 102, 137–40, 146, 151, 153–54 in animals, 47, 139 definition of, 46, 137 as innate to humans, 47, 126, 139 as weaknesses of intellect, 47–48, 139–40 Empirical knowledge, 42, 67 Empirical satisfaction and happiness 16–17 Engel, Johann Jakob, 4, 4n9, 28n61 Enlightenment thought and Haskalah, 2, 4 Maimon’s relationship with, 4, 51 popularization of, 4, 4n9, 28n61 Envy, 39, 118–19, 133, 140 and cultivation of virtue(s) 39, 118–19. See also Yetzer ha-ra Epictetus, 19 Epicureanism, 5, 18 in Hasidism, 5 Erdmenschen, 35, 35n72, 114, 114n137 See also Am Ha-aretz, Erhard, Johann Benjamin, 37n74, 51, 130–31 Erkenntnis. See Cognition; Notes on the Translation, 59. Eros, philosophical, 9 Errors, origin of, 44, 131–32 Eudaimonism, 19 Evil inclination, 39–40 Evil, origin of exoteric lesson, of morality, 34, 112, 112n135

Index

F Fanaticism, religious, 6 Fatalism, moral skepticism and, 32, 100 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 10, 38–39, 50–51, 60, 115, 118–19 and drive, 60 and Maimon’s philosophical legacy, 50–51 Maimon’s criticism of, 10,118 and systematicity, 10 personal relationship with Maimon, 38–39, 50, 119 Theologians criticism of, 38–39, 118 Works: Wissenschaftslehre, 90 Folly, 7, 41, 44–45, 86, 131–35 Foolishness, 44–45, 131–35 Force (Kraft), 22, 64–65, 69, 73, 129 Form-matter distinction, 28, 28n28 Formal cause, of emotions, 47, 139 Formalism. See Systematicity Fraenkel, Carlos, 12n30, 147 Freedom, of will, 14, 16, 23, 26, 36, 39, 41, 43, 48, 63, 68–72, 77, 79, 82, 86, 90, 111–12n134, 114–15, 119, 126, 130, 135 absolute (positive) and relative (negative), 36, 68–69, in Stoicism, 14, 23, 39, 119 See also Absolute freedom Freudenthal, Gideon, 5n12, 9, 9n19, 11n26, 28n61, 50n89, 51, 75n106 G Geist. See Intellect. See also Notes on the Translation, 59 Genesis, 32n68, 101n126 Genesis Rabbah, 40

155

Genius, and human greatness, 25, 25n57, 26, 37, 40, 80–83, 80n110, 81n111, 89, 117, 119–20 German language, Maimon’s, 7, 59 Germany, 2, 4, 7, 10, 52 Gifts of Nature (Naturgabe), 25, 25n56, 39, 79, 81, 119 Glogau, 8 God, ideas of Mosaic, 27, 90–91 patriarchial, 27, 89 Graetz, Heinrich, 2n1 Grammar, 7, 102 Grammatical imperatives, 32, 102–3 Great Personage (human greatness) and duty, 76, 86 as function of free will, 26, 36, 39, 41, 76–77, 79–82, 90–91, 114–15 and intellect, 25, 25n57, 26 Moses as, 89–91 statesmen as, 26–27, 75, 87 Gregor, Mary, 59 Grund. Notes on the Translation, 59 Guenzberg, Mordechai Aaron, 51–52 Gymnasium Christanaeum, 3n6, 6, 59

H Ha‘am, Ahad, 52 Happiness, 13n32, 16–17, 24, 32–33, 66, 72–74, 99–100, 108, 130 Hasidism, 5–6, 14, 42, 51, 53–54 and acosmism, 5–6 and anti-dualism, 5–6 and epicureanism, 5, 14 and morality, 14 rejection of aesceticism, 5 sensuality in, 5 and stoicism, 14 Haskalah, 1–4, 6

156

Index

Health, 26 Healthy human understanding, 19n45 Hebrew language, 7, 9, 33, 35, 59, 90, 103, imperatives in, 33, 103 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 50–51 Heresy, 1–3, 8, 54 Heroism, and greatness, 25, 25n57, 79 Herz, Marcus, 2, 6, 10n22 Hesheq, 9 Holiness, 27, 42, 91, 124 Horace Epodes (1, 2, 40) 36–37, 37n73 Satires, 66n103 Hypotheses, scientific, 34, 111 Hypochondria, 26, 84, 84n114, 85 I Ibn Ezra, Avraham, 8 Ibn Paquda, Bahya, 8, 9n18 Ideal reader, 36, 115–16 Idealism, German, 50–51 Ideas, distinct from concepts, 46, 46n87, as representations of reason, 137 Illness, 38, 47, 84–86, 117, 120 Illusions, as grounds for practical principals, 37, 116 Imagination, 35, 38, 47, 72, 81, 84–85, 87, 114, 118, 124, 131–32, 137 Imperatives, hypothetical and categorical, 22, 32–33, 102, Incentives, moral, 5, 16. See also Happiness Inclinations, 16, 18–19, 23–26 33, 39–40, 44, 47, 64–66, 72, 77, 79–81, 83, 87, 111n134, 132, 134 Inertia, emotions and, 46–47, 137–39 Inferiority, human, 26, 84–86.

See also Mental illness Intellect divine, 9, 13, 19 infinite, 9, 13, 15 and morality, 13, 15–16, 15n38 Intellectual perfection. See Perfection Intuition, 11, 108–9

J Jacob (Bible), 32, 90, 101 Jehova, 27, 89–91. See also Divine name Jewish identity, 2, 51–54 Job, Book of, 44, 44n82, 131 Joseph, son of Jacob, 32, 101 Judaism Orthodox, 2, as political in nature, 28, 28–29n64 Justice and Mosaic idea of God, 90–91 and emotion, 42, 26, 125–26, 137 Juvenal Satires IV, 20n47 Satires VI, 109n142

K Kabbalah, 8, 10, 12, 51 and anti-dualism, 12 tzimtzum, 51 Kafka, Franz, 53 Kalckreuth, Count Adolf von, 7, 8, 121, 143n149 Kant, Immanuel aesthetic judgment, 25–26, 25n57, 43,60, 79, 81, 81n111, 110 categorical imperative, 16, 19, 22, 31, 63, 102 duty and inclination, opposition between, 16,

Index Kant, Immanuel (continued) 18–19, 23–24, 49, 66 primacy of the practical, 9, 16 problem of motives, 16, 18 natural and moral realms, 27 Works: Anthropology from a Pragmatirc Point of View, 29, 31n66, 93, 93n119; Critique of Practical Reason, 13n32, 29, 148; Critique of Pure Reason, 9–11, 46n87, 59; Critique of Judgment, 5, 5n56, 26n58, 29, 39n76, 41n79, 59, 60, 79n109, 81n111, 110n133; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 16–17, 17n40, 22n49, 32n69, 43; Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, 67; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 13n32, 27n60, 43 Koran, 38, 118 Kraft. Notes on the Translation, 59

L Language, acquisition of. See Self-reference. Latin, in Maimon’s writing, 61 Laws of nature, 31–33, 43, 46, 64, 99, 130, 133, 137–38 Legality, 33, 108–10 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 6, 10, 45n85, 129 and moral good and evil, 129 principle of sufficient reason, 45n85 Works: Monadology, 45n85; Theodicy, 129 Library of Alexandria, burning of, 38, 118

157

Lillienblum, Moshe Lieb, 51 Lithuania, 5 Locke, John, 10 Logic (formal), 43–44, 110, 126, 131–33 Love, 47, 139. See also Emotions Lunacy, 26, 86. See also Mental illness

M Maggid of Mezricht, 5, 12 Maimon, Salomon Biography, 2–8 Philosophical development of, 8–20 Works: Hesheq Shelomo (unpublished, 1778) 8–9; “Probe rabbinischer Philosophie”; Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790), 7, 10–13; Give’at ha-Moreh, 12, 12n30 Disputations in the Area of Philosophy (1793), 7, 13; Philosophical Dictionary (1791), 7, 18, 20, 115; The Hill of the Guide (1791), 7; Autobiography (1792); On the Progress of Philosophy (1792), 7; Fundamental Principles of Newtonian Philosophy (1793), 7; Inquiry into a New Logic and Theory of Thought (1794), 7; Critical Investigations Concerning the Human Intellect (1797), 7, 15n39, 31; Attempt at a New Presentation of the Principle of Morality and a New Deduction of its Reality (1794), 17n41–42, 19–21, 22n50, 23n52, 24n55; “On the Ultimate Grounds of Natural Right” (1795), 21; “On the

158

Index

Maimon, Salomon (continued) Ultimate Grounds of Morality” (1798), 7, 18, 21–25, 29, 31, 36, 63–74;“The Great Personage” (1799), 7, 8, 25–29, 36, 75–91; “Explanation of a Well-known Anthropological Phenomenon,” (1800), 29–31, 93–97 “Letters to Herr Peina” (1799), 7, 34–41, 113–20; “The Moral Skeptic” (1800), 7, 8, 22n50, 28, 29, 31–34, 99–112; “Sophistic of the Human Heart,”(posthumous) 7, 26, 35, 41–43, 123–27; “Origin of Moral Good and Evil,” (posthumous) 7, 41, 43, 45, 129–30; “The Origin of Human Folly” (posthumous) 7, 44–45, 131–35; “On the Emotions in General” (posthumous) 7, 41, 46–48, 137–40 Maimonides, Moses, 2–4, 6, 8–9, 12–20, 24, 26, 28, 48–49, 53–54, 59 as anti-dualist, 12–13 concept of divine intellect, 9, 12n30, 13, 15, 19–20 concept of morality, 14 and happiness, 16–17, 27 and Haskalah, 3 intellectual perfection, 9, 14–15 and Maimon’s self-naming, 3, 3n6 and orthodox rabbinical community, 3 and radical Aristotelianism, 8 Works: Guide of the Perplexed, 2–3, 6, 9, 12, 14–15, 28, 33, 53, 54, 102 Maskilim. See Haskalah

Material principles, 17, 32, 99, 100, 110. See also Empirical satisfaction Mathematics, 8, 34, 60, 67, 77–78, 88, 107, 111 Matter. See Form-matter distinction Means and ends, 1, 42, 44–45, 63, 68, 76–77, 80, 84, 86, 108, 110, 125, 127, 133, 135 108, 135 Mechanical laws, 38, 117 Medicine, 6, 34, 40, 47, 111, 119–20 as cause of illness, 40, 120 Medieval scholarship, influence on Maimon, 8–9 Mendelssohn, Moses appearance in Zionist thought, 52, 51n92 as “philosopher of the world,” 28n61 and popularization of Jewish thought, 4 relationship with Maimon, 1–2,6 role in Berlin Haskalah, 1–2,6 Mensch. Notes on the Translation, 59 Mental illness, 26, 84–86 as illness of the will, 86 and inferiority, 84–86 Metaphysics of Great Personage, 25, 76 Kant’s, 13 Leibniz’s, 129 of nature, 67 Midrash, 40. See also Yetzer ha-ra Miserliness, as folly, 44, 126, 132–33 Mishnah, 35–36, 35n72, 113–4n136, 114, 114n137 Monism, 5–6

Index Montaigne, Michel de, 60 Moral perfection, 15, 66 Moral virtue, 15, 63–66 Moses (biblical) as “Great Personage,” 89–91 and lawgiving, 26–28, 27n60 in Maimonides, 26, 28 and morality, 89–91 and moral-physical paralleism, 27, 91 as political founder, 26, 26n59, 27–28, 89–91 in Spinoza, 26, 26n59, 28, 28n63 Motion and rest, states of. See Inertia Motives, 15–18, 33, 36, 39, 68–71, 99, 108, 114–15, 119, 125, 135, 138 as rooted in “original pleasurable feeling,” 18 Mysticism, 51

N Nachmanides, 8 Napoleon, 33, 36, 115 Nation, Jewish, 26, 28, 89–90 Natural necessity, 23, 43, 76, 130, 135,140 See also Principle of sufficient reason Naturgabe. See Gifts of nature Newton, Isaac, 7, 38 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44 nihil negativum, 69–70 nihil privatum, 69–70 Nissim of Geronda, 8,9 Noble lie, 34 Nomenclature. See Terminology

O Obedience and drive, 16–19 and legality, 16, 25, 91

159

Omnipotent God, postulation of 27, 27n60 Oppenheimer, Aharon, 35n72 Optics, Maimon’s study of, 6 Organization, biological, 35, 47, 72, 114, 139 Orthodox Jews, 2–3 Orthodox rabbinical community, 3 Ought, the (das Sollen), 32–33, 63–65, 70– 71, 99–101, 103–4. See also: Drive, rational

P Pantheism, 12, 51 Paquda, Bahya ibn, 8, 9n18 Pariah, Jew as. See Conscious pariah Passions, 14, 16, 18, 33, 39, 43–44, 79, 88, 102, 111, 126, 132, 138 Patriarchs, biblical, 27, 89–90 Peina, Salman Nathan, 33–40 34n70 Perfection, 5, 9, 14–18, 22–24, 26–27, 32, 46–49, 60, 63–64, 66, 72–73, 87, 99, 131 as aim for moral life, 24, 66. drive for, 17–18, 22–24, 32, 60, 64, 72 See also Wolff, Christian Personhood, 31, 32, 93–97, 100, 103, 110 Philosopher of the world, 28, 28n61 Philosopher-prophet, Moses as, 26, 28 Physics, 6, 10 Pleasant feeling, idea of in concept of drive, 22, 24, 56, 67, 80, 124–25 Polish Jews, 2, 2n3, 7, 54 attitudes toward, 2n3 Politics, 26, 28, 30, 34, 51, 53, 88–89, 111 Posen, 3, 6, 8 Possibility and actuality, 105

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Posthumous writings, 121–40 Potok, Chaim, 53 Power of desire (Begehrungsvermögen), 19, 41–43, 45, 67–68, 76, 123–24, 130, 134 Practical reason, 16, 29, 42, 105 Practical sciences, medicine and politics as, 34, 111 Prejudice as failure of will, 44, 132 in religious orthodoxy, 2 as source of error, 44, 132 Priests, Egyptian in development of Moses, 90 Primacy of the practical Maimon’s rejection of, 9, 16 Principle of sufficient reason, 45, 45n85, 69n105, 127, 135, 140 and concept of moral evil, 127 and determination of subject, 69n105 and foolishness, 135, 140 Pronouns, use of. See Self-reference. Proverbs, 38, 135n145 prudence, 1, 45, 135 Psalms, 8 Psychological delusion, 22, 22n49 Psychosomatic illnesses, 26 Purity, moral, 34, 42, 49, 71 Purposiveness. See Zweckmäßigkeit, Notes on the Translation, 59.

Q Quid facti, 11 Quid Juris, 10–13, 15

R Rabbi Jonathan, 113, 113–14n136 Rabbi Judah, 35, 113–14n136 Rabbinic sources, in Maimon’s work,

39–40, 90n116 Rational law(s), 23, 33, 38, 64–66 and virtue, 23–24, 64–66 Rationalism, 3, 8 Rationality of moral law, 34 of motives and deeds, 33 Reason common human, 32, 100, 107–9, 112 and morality, 43, 70, 73 opposition to the body, 35, 47, 114 practical, 15–16, 29, 42, 105 pure, 16, 35, 67, 90, 100, 114 and stoicism, 14, 18 supersensible domain of, 43 theoretical, 17, 106–8 Reinhold, Karl Leonard, 5, 9n20, 10, 18, 19n45, 24, 24n54, 24n55, 50, 65n102, 105 on drive, 18, 24, 65n102 relationship with Maimon, 10 on systematicity, 10 on will, 105 Relative concepts, language and 97 Religion, 2–6, 13, 27n60, 42n80, 118 Representation, 12, 31, 60, 71, 100, 110, 137 of morality, 71, 110. See also Legality Role-playing, life as, 37, 116 Rosenthaler Gate. See Berlin Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20n47, 30–31, 30n65, 52

S Sacrifice, as criterion for greatness, 36, 115

Index Sapere aude, 37, 116 Satisfaction and happiness, 17, 23–24, 73–74 of natural drives, 23–24, 64–65 of rational drives, 23–24, 64–65 and self-restraint, 76 and virtue, 23–24, 65–66, 73–74 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 50, 51 Scholars, role in Judaism, 28–29n64 Scholem, Gershom, 54 Sciences, Maimon’s critique of, 34, 40, 111, 119 Self-activity, 46, 51, 51n92, 72, 132, 138 Self-actualization, 46, 64 Self-annihilation, 51, 51n92 Self-consciousness, origins of 29, 31 Self-control, 23, 25–26, 65–66 See also Stoicism, virtue Self-determination, 46, 63, 70, 138 See also Freedom, of will Self-interest, 16, 42 See also Means and ends Self-reference and negative abstraction, 30, 96 and pronouns “I” and “you” 29–31, 93–97 and positive abstraction, 30, 96–97 Self-subsistent cause, God as, 27, 89 See also God, ideas of Sensation, 30, 35, 47, 96–97, 114, 123, 131–32, 134 Sense perceptions. See Sensation Shtetl, culture of, 2, 54 Silesia, 7, 143 Sinai, 53 Size, mathematical, 25, 25n37, 60,

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77–79, 82, 97, 131 and human greatness, 25, 25n37, 60, 77–79, 82, Society, 33, 63, 108 Socher, Abraham, 3n6, 9, 50n88, 141n146 Sophistry, 42–43, 45, 123–24 Soul, 11, 15, 86 Speech. See Self-reference Spinoza, 2, 5–6, 8, 26, 28, 12, anti-dualist thought, 12 appropriation in German Idealism, 51, 51n92 conatus and drive, 22, 22n51, 60 denial of mosaic authorship of Torah, 8 in Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790), 10 on freedom of the will, 16 fusion of moral with natural, 25 heretical belief and, 2 portrayal of Moses 26, 28 Stoicism, 14, 18, 23–24, 39–40, 65–66, 119 and Epicureanism, 14, 18 and free will, 14, 18, 23, 39, 65–66, 119 Strauss, Leo, 28n63, 53, 53n95, 55, 55n99 Striving, 15, 17, 22, 33–34, 39, 43, 46, 48–49, 64, 75, 78–79, 99–100, 108, 110, 116, 119, 125, 127, 133, 135, 137–138, 140 Students of Wisdom (Weise), 35, 114, 114n137 Sukowiborg (Zukowy Borek), 5 Sultan Mohammed II, 38, 118. See also Library of Alexandria, burning of

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Supersensible domain of reason, 43 Supercommentary, 8,9 See also Commentary Superstition, in Orthodox Judaism, 2–4 Synthetic a priori judgments. See A priori Systematicity appearance of, in “On the Ultimate Grounds of Morality,” 21–22 contrasted with tradition of commentary, 9–10 Maimon’s inclination away from, 9–10 T Talmud Maimon’s study of, 9–10 Tense, grammatical, and divine name, 90n116 and imperatives, 33, 99n123, 103 Terminology, 17n41, 47, 49, 59–61, 76 Aristotelian, 47 Kantian, 16, 17n41, 22, 45n86, 49, 59, translation of, 59–61 Theocracy, Jewish nation as, 28n64 Theorems in Maimon’s writings, 22, 69–74 See also Systematicity Theory and praxis, unity of, 19–20, 34, 48, 131 Torah, Maimon’s study of, 5, 8 Transcendental philosophy truths, hierarchy of, 18, 42, 124–25 Tscheggey, J.C. 7–8, 141–43 tzimtzum, 51. See also Hasidism; Kabbalah

U Ultimate perfection, intellect as, 14–15 Understanding, the, 46n87, 72, 85, 137 relation to concepts, 46n87, 137 Universal validity, 10, 16, 19, 31 Unpleasant feeling(s), 46, 65, 84 V Vanity, 39, 76, 110 Vermögen. Notes on the Translation, 59 Versuch. Notes on the Translation, 59 Virtue, 15, 18, 22–25, 38–39, 42, 63–66, 72– 74, 117, 118–19, 124–26 as beginning in envy, 39, 118–19 and happiness, 22–24, 72–74 in Maimonides, 15 relation to duty, 22–24, 63–66 vis inertia of emotion. See Inertia “vitam impendere vero,” 20, 48 Volition, 104–6, 109 animal, 106 human, 106 Vorstellung. See Notes on Translation, 59 W Weise. See Students of wisdom Will (Wille) 14, 16, 18, 19, 21–27, 32–33, 36, 39, 43–50, 60, 63–66, 68–72, 76–77, 79, 84–89, 102–4, 106–12, 114, 119, 126–27, 132–35, 138–39 Determination of, 63–64, 68–71, 104, 111n134, 126 Freedom of. See Freedom, of will Perfection of, 22–24, 63–66, 72 weakness of, 26, 47, 84; See also Virtue; Mental Illness, Will (Werden), 99–101

Index Wolff, Christian, 6, 10, 22, 24, 24n53 Women, 88–89 Y yetzer ha-ra (evil inclination), 39–40 Yiddish language, presence in Maimon’s Writing, 7, 35, 35n72, 59 See Notes on the Translation Z Zionism, Maimon’s legacy and, 51–53 Zukowy, Borek, 5 Zweckmäßigkeit. See Notes on the Translation.

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