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3 The Good beyond Being Ethico-Political Intricacies of a Medieval Debate In this third chapter, Cohen addresses the problem of the Aristotelian terminology in which mainstream medieval Jewish philosophy admittedly couches its ethics. Cohen demonstrates how the mechanical assumptions of Aristotelian cosmology and metaphysics and Aristotle’s utilitarian understanding of the good are irreconcilable with Maimonides ’ theory of knowing God. He thereby provides an “esoteric” reading of Maimonides, in which Aristotelian language is used to disguise the Platonic foundations of Maimonides’ theological position. Toward the end of this section, Cohen arrives at the heart of his argument, providing the philosophical grounds for a new formulation of Maimonides ’ theory concerning God’s actional attributes. (See 49.) “The generally assumed doctrine.” Maimonides refers to Aristotle extensively throughout the Guide. He clearly adopts Aristotle’s metaphysical and scientific terminology and has thus been widely and authoritatively interpreted as an Aristotelian thinker. There is an oblique but authoritative allusion to Aristotle in the introduction to the Eight Chapters, and we find a most distinguishing remark on Aristotle in one of Maimonides’ letters—“Aristotle’s philosophy is the supreme achievement of human thinking.”1 All these factors taken together account for the fact that 48. We had to preface our discussion with these elaborate remarks, in order to establish the grounds for a critical investigation of the thesis which seems to be a guiding principle of Maimonidean ethics: the laws of ethics are not rational laws [twyl"" kç], nor traditional laws, but are to be classified as those of convention , of general agreement (twmsrwpm). 49. The generally assumed doctrine —that Maimonides has proven himself in this central point to be an epigone of Aristotle—fails to provide us with viable historical understanding . This assumption seems to have Cohen’s Founding of a Platonic Jewish Family ethics of maimonides 50 Aristotelian readings of Maimonides ’ ethics do prevail in contemporary scholarship. Maimonides ’ ethics emerges therein as a masterful but philosophically rather uncreative attempt to integrate Aristotelian philosophy with the Jewish sources.2 Cohen’s innovative interpretation of Maimonides’ ethics, on the other hand, situates Maimonides’ attitude toward history, Jewish law, the doctrine of creation, and eschatology, as well as social and political theory within a philosophical context committed to weaving the Platonic idea of the Good into the fabric of Jewish tradition . Cohen is the first of a family of modern Jewish thinkers who makes the Platonic concept of the Good beyond Being interact and correspond with the concept of the Jewish God who demands justice and the Good. Cohen’s Platonic reading of Maimonides constitutes the beginning of a prominently ethical bent among modern and contemporary Jewish thinkers who continue to read Jew-ish tradition in the light of the Platonic Good and in opposition to any fundamental ontology. Such divergent thinkers as Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, Steven Schwarzschild, and Emmanuel Levinas develop their own interpretations of Jewish tradition along the very lines of a Platonic reading. The ethical implications of these interpretations, however, have nowhere been as forcefully explicated as in this original text, Cohen’s interpretation of Maimonides. ignored how much it deprecates the religious idea and its inherent value for Maimonidean ethics. With due respect to the God of Aristotle, he is truly not the God of Israel. [Cohen alludes here to Judah ha-Levi’s classical distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham; see Kuzari 1964, 4:16, 223. In Pascal and Kierkegaard this distinction attains a radically different meaning; see Kodalle 1988, 309–10.] It is well known, and we will have to investigate this painstakingly , how intimately ethics is related in Maimonides to the doctrine of the unique God, who demands goodness. And ought this not to be sufficiently decisive for the basic question about the cognitive value of ethics? Should the mere mention of the name God, or gods, in Aristotle have been sufficient for Maimonides to have been driven blindly into the arms of this pagan philosopher? We would discredit the peculiar distinctiveness of the concept of God in Jewish monotheism if we were to attribute to it such insignificant influence regarding the fundamental problem of ethics as a science. 50. Let us clarify the respective rationales of both Aristotle and Maimonides for rejecting the strict rationality of ethics. We are already familiar with Aristotle’s animosity toward the Platonic idea, toward the idea of the Good. [Aristotle 1945, NE 1096a–1097a, 17–25; 1981, Eudemian Ethics 1217b, 223–33.] To be...

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