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3 The Gothic World Comes to the South “Di Provenza il mar, il suol, Chi dal cor ti cancellò?”1 —La Traviata The Government of Our Lives Beginning with his Treatise on Logic, an early work written in Arabic, Maimonides understood political science as the knowledge concerning he who commands and he who obeys, as well as the ability to do away with corruption .2 Strangely enough, among the ingredients that made up this science, he included the government of the life of each person. In order to understand that life more fully, human beings are the only ones capable of governing their lives according to the art and knowledge of the political. It is essential for them not to lose control over their lives for, if they did so, they would fall into the same category as animals. Maimonides’ critics have interpreted this very advanced and, at the same time, vexing definition merely as a youthful step designed simply to digest the teachings of his Muslim masters. Nevertheless, this underestimates the Hebrew education of Rambam. During the cultural apogee of the tenth century it is known that the Jews of al-Andalus spoke Arabic while still preserving their Hebrew language.3 Medieval Jewish thought flourished under the influence of Islamic civilization from the ninth century to the thirteenth century: Maimonides’ “language was Arabic [and] his concerns were determined by matters arising within the context of Islamic thought.”4 As a young man, Maimonides studied with his father and his teachers from Lucena,5 and it is logical to assume that his knowledge was distilled by the quality of his teachers.6 To state that this vision of political science is a mere transposition of Aristotilianism7 is, to say the least, to simplify matters. This implies an ignorance of the depth of the internal world that Maimonides had already perceived and valued. 67 68 A Vigilant Society It is not unusual to try to depoliticize Rambam’s statement, given that, for political science, and more specifically, for Calvinist positivism, it is forbidden to speak of the misgovernment of persons outside the matrix of the modern sciences. Thus, when a dysfunction is detected in the life of a child or an adult, he or she is referred to a priest, teacher, psychologist, social worker, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst. The cause of this dysfunction may be due to hyperactivity, malign phobias, sleep disorders, compulsive addictions, or antisocial behavior.8 Among the few who dared to propose openly the importance of controlling every aspect of a person’s life was Sigmund Freud, a figure close to Maimonides in this sense. Freud approaches the world of the government and misgovernment of an individual from a medical standpoint. His initial position is that of a young, progressive Jewish scientist assimilated into the Viennese culture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As one of his biographers says, he is a rightful “heir of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.”9 His strategy of assimilation into Viennese society is to resort to a radical scientific pose that is both atheistic and positivist. This manifests itself openly in his reluctance to follow Jewish traditions and rituals, as he had already done in his father’s house. Later on, and in spite of the fact that his wife, Martha Bernays, was very observant, he would also impose this ban categorically in his own home. Professionally he would lean toward medicine, which, at that time was seen as a hard science of the laboratory and experimentation in its strictist materialistic version. With the passage of time, Freud retraced his steps, passing from materialistic science to what he called “psychology,” to end up recognizing that his work was neither in medicine nor in psychology but really in philosophy. But given the fact that Freud’s training in philosophy was limited to the teachings of Franz Brentano,10 and little else, we can infer that he is referring to political philosophy, which, in the long run, is what his work will deal with in a very innovative way. Thus, Freud’s philosophy is perfectly clear when seen in the light of Maimonides’ wise vision of political thought. But returning to Maimonides, we have already said that he should not be considered merely as an Aristotelian. He is not a Sephardic philosopher educated in the memory of Greek culture that sees in man the animal whose species, different from the others, possesses the logos. In this line of thought man is an animal of the polis whose...

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