Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors

Introduction

Introduction In a phrase of Hermann Cohen, Maimonides is the "classic of rationalism" in Judaism. This phrase appears to us to be correct in a stricter sense than Cohen may have intended: Maimonides' rationalism is the true natural model , the standard to be carefully protected from any distortion , and thus the stumbling-block on which modern rationalism falls. To awaken a prejudice in favor of this view of Maimonides and, even more, to arouse suspicion against the powerful opposing prejudice, is the aim of the present work. Even if one is free of all natural inclination towards the past, even ifone believes that the present, as the age in which man has attained the highest rung yet of his selfconsciousness , can really learn nothing from the past, one still encounters Maimonides's teaching as soon as one seriously attempts to make up one's mind about the present so assessed. For such an attempt can succeed only if one continually confronts modern rationalism, as the source of the present, with medieval rationalism. But if one undertakes a confrontation of this kind seriously, and thus in the freedom of the question which of the two opposed rationalisms is the true rationalism, then medieval rationalism, whose "classic" for us is Maimonides, changes in the course of the investigation from a mere means ofdiscerning more sharply the specific character of modern rationalism into the 21 22 Introduction standard measured against which the latter proves to be only a semblanee of rationalism. And thus the self-evident starting-point, that self-knowledge is a necessary and meaningful undertaking for the present, acquires an unself -evident justification: the critique of the present, the critique of modern rationalism1 as the critique of modern sophistry, is the necessary beginning, the constant companion , and the unerring sign of that search for truth which is possible in our time. The present situation ofJudaism-leaving aside, therefore , the fundamental constitution ofJudaism, which is not affected in or by this situation-is determined by the Enlightenment . For all phenomena peculiar to the present-if one does not let oneself be deceived by their foregrounds and pretenses--refer back to the Enlightenment, that is, to the movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries initiated by Descartes' Meditations and Hobbes' Leviathan, as their source. This fact is hard to contest; only its bearing and significance are, certainly, contestable. The premises about which the present is at one with the Age of Enlightenment have now become so self-evident that it is only or chiefly the opposition between the Enlightenment and the present that tends to be remarked and taken seriously: the Enlightenment appears long since to have been "overcome"; its legitimate c:oncerns, which have now become "trivial," appear to have been taken into account; its "shallowness," on the other hand, appears to have fallen into deserved contempt. How remote from our age is the quarrel about the verbal inspiration vs. the merely human origin of Scripture ; about the reality vs. the impossibility of the Biblical miracles; about the eternity and thus the immutability vs. the historical variability of the Law; about the creation of the world vs. the eternity of the world: all discussions are now conducted on a level on which the great controversial questions debated by the Enlightenment and orthodoxy no longer even need to be posed, and must ultimately even be rejected as "falsely posed." If the matter could be left at that, the influence of the Enlightenment on Judaism would Introduction 23 be in fact as unworthy of serious reflection and care as it is taken to be not, indeed, by all contemporary men, but certainly by all contemporary "movements." But are the premises of the Enlightenment really trivial? Is the Enlightenment really a contemptible adversary? If, however, the foundation of the Jewish tradition is belief in the creation of the world, in the reality of the Biblical miracles, in the absolutely binding character and essential immutability of the Law, resting on the revelation at Sinai, then one must say that the Enlightenment has undermined the foundation of the Jewish tradition. Indeed from the very beginning it was with complete consciousness and complete purposefulness that the radical Enlightenment -think of Spinoza-did this. And as far as the moderate Enlightenment is concerned, it had to pay for its attempt to mediate between orthodoxy and radical enlightenment , between belief in revelation and belief in the selfsufficiency of...