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  • Maimonides & Spinoza: Their Conflicting Views of Human Nature by Joshua Parens
  • Yehuda Halper
Joshua Parens. Maimonides & Spinoza: Their Conflicting Views of Human Nature. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. vii + 226. Cloth, $35.00.

For many years now scholars have debated the extent of Maimonides’s influence on Spinoza. Indeed, Spinoza is known to have read and studied Maimonides, and Maimonides is certain to have played a large part in Spinoza’s philosophical development. Most scholars agree, however, that Spinoza was not a Maimonidean, even though they often disagree about what specifically distinguishes the two thinkers. Joshua Parens takes aim at those scholars who, he considers, “too readily assimilate Maimonides to Spinoza, and vice versa” (15). He aims to explain the difference between Maimonides and Spinoza and to prove once and for all that Maimonides was a medieval and Spinoza a modern.

In each of the six chapters making up the body of this book, Parens identifies and compares central concepts in the works of Maimonides and Spinoza. For Spinoza, these concepts are conatus, equality, laws of nature, determinism, imagined ideals, and imagination. Parens finds comparisons, respectively, with desire (and spiritedness), veneration, forms, freedom, teleology, and prudence in Maimonides’s works. Parens’s arguments for the centrality of these concepts and the correspondence between them are likely to arouse controversy. Indeed, the concepts of the second set are not usually considered the central topics of any of Maimonides’s works, but have evidently been selected with a view to their counterparts in Spinoza. Yet, issues normally considered central to Maimonides are covered under the rubrics of Parens’s central concepts. Thus, for example, God’s incorporeality is [End Page 319] discussed in connection with veneration and form, providence in connection with [human] freedom, creation in connection with teleology, and prophecy in connection with prudence.

The Maimonidean concepts Parens identifies are first and foremost Aristotelian concepts. Parens’s main argument is that Maimonides adopts the Aristotelian philosophical worldview and adapts it to the Jewish context, cleverly reinterpreting Biblical and Rabbinic views to accommodate Aristotle. Consequently, according to Parens, when Spinoza refutes and undermines Aristotle and Aristotelianism, he also refutes and undermines Maimonides. For example, in chapter 1, Parens brings out an Aristotelian account of desire in Maimonides’s writings: Maimonides encourages curbing bodily desires, anger, and the desire for victory or spiritedness, in favor of the desire for theoretical knowledge. When properly inculcated, this desire can become erotic love of God, even of God understood as nous noun noein. For Spinoza, desire, love, and spiritedness are all expressions of conatus, the will for self-preservation. In fact, everything is an expression of conatus, insofar as conatus is the efficient cause of all activity and the unifying force of the world and scientific thought. Philosophical speculation is just one other expression of conatus. It becomes clear that Maimonides’s desire and spiritedness are too specific to be proper counterparts to Spinoza’s conatus. Why not compare Maimonides’s desire and spiritedness with Spinoza’s desire and passion? By the end of the book, Parens seems to indicate that, in fact, reason or intellect may be a better Maimonidean counterpart to conatus. This becomes evident, for example, in chapter 4, where Parens argues that although Spinoza advocates political liberty, he views human choices as entirely determined by bodily affects, that is, by conatus. In contrast, Maimonides, though by no means an advocate of political liberty, nevertheless, in Parens’s view, believes in free choice (Aristotle’s prohairesis), which is open to deliberation and reasoning. Another example: in chapter 6, Parens argues that Maimonides adopts Aristotle’s notion of practical intellect and integrates it into his account of prophecy in the Guide of the Perplexed (a particularly complex argument, since Maimonides does not mention ‘practical intellect’ in the Guide), while for Spinoza all decisions, practical or otherwise, are made via mechanisms that begin with conatus. This follows Parens’s argument in chapter 5 that for Spinoza human ends (telē) are only imagined ideals. Though human endeavors may seem to be guided by reasoned thought, they are in fact driven, often subconsciously, by conatus. For Maimonides, the world, at least the...

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