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  • The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy
  • Gideon Freudenthal
Abraham P. Socher . The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 248. Cloth $55.00.

With few philosophers are life and work so intimately connected as with Salomon Maimon. Born in 1753 in Lithuania and raised in an orthodox Jewish community, Maimon "pilgrimaged" at the age of twenty-five to Berlin, the capital of the Jewish Enlightenment. After [End Page 661] some years of education in sciences and languages, Maimon produced, in less than ten years (1789–97), a series of books and papers that today make up the seven volumes of his collected works. A clochard, dependent on benefactors, Maimon died young, in 1800, presumably of alcoholism. The autobiography of this self-styled "Diogenes" and critic of Kant was among the best-known of the eighteenth century. In it, Maimon not only describes his intellectual as well as physical path to Enlightenment (in Berlin) as seeking "perfection," but also discusses philosophical issues and dedicates about half of the second volume to Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, which was decisive in his intellectual development. In his autobiography too, life and work are inseparably intertwined.

Writing an intellectual biography of Maimon might seem, therefore, a highly promising and rewarding project—and yet, it is far from clear that this can be done. We have hardly any sources regarding Maimon's life other than his autobiography, which thus dictates not only most of the facts but also the narrative. Abraham Socher repeatedly characterizes Maimon's autobiography as a highly constructed Bildungsroman and raises an incredulous eyebrow at certain anecdotes (53, 117), but he, too, is bound to adopt Maimon's interpretation of his life as a persistent quest for intellectual self-perfection. In fact, Socher's main thesis is that in spite of the contemporary ideal of Bildung, Maimon remained faithful to the medieval and specifically Maimonidean ideal of exclusively intellectual self-perfection. Since knowing in this tradition is understood in terms of the conjunction of the human intellect with the divine active intellect, the intellectual and religious ideals coincide.

It is not new that intellectual perfection was crucial to Maimon. What is new is the attempt to write Maimon's intellectual biography from this perspective, emphasizing his (unpublished) early Hebrew manuscripts, which allegedly demonstrate his "Maimonidean" formation. Unfortunately, the scholarship and analysis in this book do not really contribute much to our understanding of Maimon's philosophy or his philosophical formation. For shortage of space, a few examples must suffice.

One problem is that the ideal of intellectual perfection is not endorsed in the original body of Maimon's text, but was introduced later, in the book's introduction (from which most of Socher's quotations are taken), in some marginal notes, and on a few single pages that do not belong with this compilation of manuscripts but were bound with it in the nineteenth century. The author overlooks the place in which Maimon explicitly discusses—and rejects!—Maimonides' theory of the intellect (and conjunction), as well as the note added later on the opposite page (Hesheq Shlomo 125r, 123v), where Maimon "revokes" this criticism. Having read Locke's Essay and Leibniz's New Essays, Maimon says that he now endorses Maimonides' theory. Hence, regarding the intellect, Maimon became a Maimonidean (in an Averroist interpretation) late in life and in the context of his reaction to modern, not medieval, philosophy. Moreover, Socher fails to distinguish "intellectual perfection" (Shlemut ha-sekhel) from the "perfection of the soul" (nefesh) and uses the terms interchangeably (17, 108, 162), whereas Maimon consistently refers to the perfection of the intellect, not the soul. The former excludes fantasy and emotions and is, therefore, incompatible with Bildung. The difference between Maimon's intellectualism and Bildung, which the author wished to put in relief, thus remains opaque.

To substantiate that Jewish authors of the Enlightenment were committed exclusively to the ideal of perfection, Socher argues that the allegedly new ideal of worldly happiness (osher) is but the medieval summum bonum. However, the sources referred to prove the opposite (79...

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