Maimon’s Philosophical Itinerary
IN HIS LEBENSGESCHICHTE, MAIMON describes his way from Lithuania to Berlin as a migration from the “blackest darkness” in Lithuania to Berlin, a capital of Enlightenment, “to pursue light and truth and to try to free myself from superstition and ignorance” (215). The way from darkness to light coincides with the way from Jewish lore and Hebrew language to West-European culture and German. The dramatic transformation culminates in an “intellectual rebirth” (geistliche Wiedergeburt) (124) and, typical of conversion, with the assumption of a new name: “Shelomo Ben-Yehoshua” takes on the name “Salomon Maimon.”
This narrative has much to recommend itself in respect to science but is misleading in respect to philosophy. Concerning modern science and learning, Maimon certainly suffered deficiencies in Lithuania. The very few scientific books he could obtain with heroic efforts were, at least in part, semi-popular or outdated, and he was not even in a position to appreciate the fact that such books failed to capture modern science. But even more detrimental was the fact that he did not enjoy systematic schooling. As a child, for example, he read a treatise of astronomy that happened to be on his father’s bookshelf. In retrospect, Maimon observes that he read the book before he ever studied elementary geometry, and that he therefore poorly understood it (17–18). It is also worth noting that this Hebrew book on astronomy (Nechmad ve’naim by David Gans) was completed in 1609 but published for the first time in 1743. By the time Maimon read it, it was more than 150 years old! When Maimon finally entered Berlin (1780) and encountered modern mathematical books, he broke out in tears, lamenting that in Lithuania he was deprived of the means to attain (intellectual) perfection, which is the vocation of man.1 In this respect, the move to Berlin and the studies at the Gymnasium “Christianeum” in Altona (1783–85) were indeed revolutionary.Things are different in metaphysics. It is true, in Lithuania Maimon studied medieval Jewish philosophy only (in the first place: Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed). Nevertheless he seemed little impressed upon his encounter with modern philosophy, and immediately turned to criticize Wolff’s metaphysics, the foremost philosophy of recent decades (197). This tallies well with Maimon’s view that philosophy does not make substantial progress in history. In his allegory “The Merry Masquerade Ball,” which concludes his autobiography, Maimon extensively discusses pre-Socratic and Greek philosophy in general, and then turns without further ado to a very brief presentation of Kant and himself. Modern philosophy in general, so he says there, “introduced a better analytical method without making any progress in metaphysics” (242, n w.).
Maimon’s philosophical work gives us an opportunity to realize an old dream: to witness a conversation between philosophers of different ages. Schooled in Medieval Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics, Maimon read Locke and Leibniz, Bacon and Hume, Wolff, Mendelssohn, and Spinoza, and above all Kant. He leaped over more than six hundred years of philosophical history. He therefore “misunderstood” Kant in a very productive way and conceived an original philosophy of his own, a synthesis of traditional metaphysics and modern philosophy that was little understood in his time and after. Maimon’s own conclusion from living simultaneously in different epochs was that “the philosophical opinions circulate so-to-say among the philosophers of all epochs and all parts of the world.”2
Maimon’s style of writing is also indebted to his Jewish heritage. In Jewish lore, new knowledge is mainly generated and conveyed through commentaries: commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, super-commentaries (i.e., commentaries on commentaries) on both, or commentaries on any other more or less canonical text. In philosophy, too, Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed or Halevy’s Kuzari have usually been printed together with renowned commentaries. Maimon’s first literary products were three commentaries or supercommentaries on well-known Jewish texts.3 It is not surprising, therefore, that writing commentaries has been Maimon’s first and natural choice of medium for philosophical work, and indeed most of his German writings, too, are commentaries of a sort on canonical books.
However, Maimon saw no contradiction between writing commentaries, which are essentially unsystematic, and systematic philosophizing. In a letter to Reinhold he affirmed that “it is my innermost conviction that my system is as completely elaborated as any other,” and added: “I flatter myself that I can deliver the best commentaries on Hume, Leibniz and Kant.”4
Concerning his first German book, Versuch über die Transscendentalphilosophie (1790), Maimon said that he committed his thoughts on Kant’s Critique to paper “in the form of glosses and clarifications.” Upon repeated rereading of his text he found some loci unclear, and clarified them with notes almost as long as the text itself. “And since I am my own commentator, I dare say that I understood myself.”5 Maimon’s writings were often not understood or misunderstood precisely because they were written as commentaries. Extracting the philosophical position of an author from his commentaries on another philosophy requires specific hermeneutic skills alien to the modern reader. The reader must keep in mind the commentator’s expositions of various passages in the text and attempt to reconstruct a general conception in which they all cohere. He must develop hermeneutic hypotheses and corroborate or refute them by other passages. His role is much more demanding than that of the reader of a systematic treatise; he has to reconstruct the system from scattered elements, whereas the latter finds them already assembled. No wonder that many readers believed that there was no systematic thought behind Maimon’s “glosses and elucidations.”
Although Maimon’s thought is arguably systematic, his opposition to philosophical “systems” is clear and firm. The apparent inconsistency is perhaps best understood and resolved in terms of the French Encyclopédie. Maimon admires the “esprit systématique” of modern science and philosophy but strongly opposes the “esprit de système.” (The terms are Condillac’s in his Essay des Systèmes, 1749, and they were quoted in d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie, 1751.) The former is what we may call the scientific spirit: It begins with observed phenomena, forms concepts, and formulates explanatory hypotheses, which are then checked against phenomena. The latter is the attempt to construct general metaphysical systems beginning not with particular knowledge but with some supreme principle: such “systems” are barren, and they deal of words instead of reality.
In Maimon, philosophy should be continuous with the sciences. We begin with knowledge of particulars, formulate conjectures, corroborate or falsify them, and we strive for ever more general theories towards a single vanishing point, the “infinite intellect.” Maimon does not claim that such an “infinite intellect” exists, but only that this is the guiding idea of our intellectual endeavor. The construction of knowledge “bottom-up” is made explicit in Maimon’s criticism of both Fichte and Reinhold. In 1794, he wrote to Fichte:
I am expecting with joy the time when, as you say, “philosophy should be a systematic science.” On my part, too, I will not fail to contribute towards this goal as much as is in my weak forces. We will meet on the very same way, even though it seems that we will travel it in opposite directions. You wish to travel it from top to bottom (from the concept of a science as such to the concrete sciences), but I want to travel it from bottom to top.6
The alternative to a “system” top-down or to a leap from phenomena to a supreme principle of all is a science-like philosophy that proceeds bottom-up step by step from phenomena to ever more comprehensive hypotheses—but never reaches either the top or certainty.
In a philosophy “bottom-up,” concepts are formed by abstraction from objects in experience and they naturally also apply to them. However, in a philosophy like Kant’s, in which the fundamental concepts (“categories”) are inherent to the mind and a priori, independent of experience, a serious problem arises: can we justify our presumption that these concepts of the mind apply to the (a posteriori) world of experience? If the sensible world and the mind are independent of each other (“dualism”), why would the objects of experience fall under our concepts? Why should concepts inherent to the mind fit sensations arising from impressions of the objects on our senses? For example: We have the concepts “cause-effect” and we formulate “natural laws.” But what guarantee do we have that the world is governed by natural laws and that our concepts apply to it? In Kant, this problem appears as the “quid-juris-question.”
In mathematics the problem does not arise in this form. Its objects are not “given,” but “constructed” in pure intuitions in accordance with a concept, and the “correspondence” between concept and object is then evident.7 This correspondence guarantees that the concept applies to the object constructed. Moreover, the object constructed is understood as a “schema” of all objects that fall under the concept. Thus, what we prove of a triangle is true of all triangles, not only of the singular object constructed. The concept “schema” will serve also to answer the question how pure concepts (for example: cause-effect) apply to sensible experience.
In his autobiography, Maimon recounts how he studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and wrote his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy.
My Transcendental Philosophy takes up the problem that Kant’s Critique tries to solve—namely, quid juris?—but in a much broader sense than in Kant’s works. My theory thus leaves room for Humean skepticism in all its force. On the other hand, a complete solution to the problem would necessarily lead to Spinozist or Leibnizean dogmatism (231).
Returning either to “dogmatism” or to “skepticism” (or, in Maimon’s case, to both) means that Kant’s ambition to supersede these schools is denied. With this also Kant’s claim is denied that there are “synthetic judgments a priori,” i.e., propositions that amplify our knowledge and are nevertheless necessarily true.
Maimon sent the manuscript of VT to Kant, on April 7, 1789. In the accompanying letter, he specified that whereas Kant’s question refers to the application of “something” a priori to “something” a posteriori, he, Maimon, asks: “How can an a priori concept be applied to an intuition, even an a priori intuition?”8 In Maimon, the essential contrast is hence not between a priori and a posteriori or between the forms of the understanding and “experience” as in Kant, but between understanding and sensibility as such and therefore also within mathematics, most prominently in geometry.
In the published version of VT, which was edited after receiving Kant’s response, Maimon further extended Kant’s “quid juris” question and maintained that it is
one and the same as the important question that has occupied all previous philosophy, namely the explanation of the community (Gemeinschaft) between soul and body, or again, as the explanation of the world’s arising (with respect to its matter) from an intelligence . . . or again, the relation of form to matter.9
As with many other terms in Kant’s work, “quid juris” too is his own coinage, and the question concerning it seems peculiar to his philosophy. Maimon’s understanding of it in a “broader sense” and the thesis that it “has occupied all previous philosophy” is a radical critique of Kant’s claim to have achieved a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy. On Maimon’s reading, Kant is yet another philosopher who offers an answer to an age-old question. Maimon is of course aware that no academic philosopher of his time (or ours) would accept such reinterpretation, but in his view followers of Kant are sectarians who tend to believe that “Kant knows everything, and knows everything better than others and he alone knows everything.”10
Many a scholastic [schulgerechter] professor who has heard something of the question quid juris? [ . . . ] will here shake his head and cry out: a strange notion to reduce the question quid juris? to the question de commercio animi et corporis! But what seems strange to many a professor, need not, on this account, be strange in fact.11
Maimon rather recommends the “indispensable skill” of replacing ideas by others if the difference pertains to the expression only (124)—and he himself demonstrated this ability in reformulating the allegedly peculiar Kantian quid juris question as a limited version of the “form-matter” problem of “all previous philosophy.” On the other hand, Maimon’s critique implies also that the quid juris question is not an artificial product of some idiosyncrasy of Kant’s philosophy, but a genuine problem, such that remains valid under different conceptualizations. It seems that this is also what Maimon claims for his own philosophy, which, he says, is a “coalition system” of all the philosophies he had studied (230).
Having established that the categories are inherent to the mind and independent of experience, Kant ventures to argue that we can nevertheless be assured that they apply to experience. The nature of Kant’s argument (or arguments) of these most enigmatic sections of the Critique has been controversial for centuries and no consensus has been reached. Fortunately, Kant’s argument need not be elaborated here since Maimon not only interpreted the question in a “broader sense,” but also considered only one element of Kant’s answer: the so-called “schematism.” The schematism is intended to mediate between the heterogeneous a priori concepts and a posteriori objects of experience in that it shares a property with each. It is a method of the imagination (Einbidlungskraft) to produce an image that corresponds to a concept. For example: the application of the concept of causality to experience. Causality cannot be experienced with our senses. In order to apply the category of causality to events in experience, we need “some third thing,”12 which is homogenous with both. For Kant, this third thing is time. We subsume phenomena under the category “causality” (a priori) if they follow upon one another in a rule-governed succession in time (a posteriori).13
In his criticism, Maimon points out that “cause” and “effect” are correlative concepts. Such concepts define each other and that an effect has a cause is therefore necessarily true. But not so the application of these concepts to experience! A cause must have an effect and vice versa, because they are so defined, but this does not entail that there are in experience objects corresponding to these concepts or that fire warms stones (Maimon turns an example of Kant against him). We know this fact only from experience. If the assertion is true, it is contingent, not necessarily true. In conclusion, there are no synthetic judgments a priori in experiential knowledge. In spite of the admiration for Newton’s physics, this theory, too, is only probable, and as all knowledge it leaves “room for Humean skepticism in all its force” (231).14
Maimon discussed the “quid juris” question in a “broader sense,” including in it the creation of the material world by an intelligence, and the mind-body-problem. These additions to the quid juris question have already been discussed in Maimon’s early Hebrew manuscripts, although of course neither the “quid juris” question or Kant are mentioned there, since he had not yet encountered Kant.
Maimon’s point of departure in these manuscripts is Maimonides’ theory of knowledge. In this theory, the intellect is not a substance and has no nature of its own. The soul’s potential for apprehension is called the “potential intellect.” Once the essence (“form”) is abstracted from the sensible object and known, this potential of the soul actualizes in knowledge. In this knowledge the “form” of the object and the cognizer’s potential for apprehension unite in actual knowledge (also called “intellect in actu”). On this reading, the omniscient God, who is permanently in actu, is identical to the world (or its form), and the human intellect, when actualized, is identical to the “forms” or the “essences” of objects of experience.
However, Maimon rejected Maimonides’ theory of the intellect. He conceived God and the human intellect as substances with properties. This gives rise to the two questions that Maimon was to add later to Kant’s quid juris question: the relation of God or “separate forms” (ideas or incorporeal intelligences) to sensible bodies and the mind-body problem. The manuscript Livnat Hasappir (לבנת הספיר) begins thus:
The opinion of the metaphysicians who negate attributes of Him, may He be exalted, is known, and also Maimonides discussed this at length in The Guide [of the Perplexed]. But you should know that this is true in respect to Himself without connection to the existent beings, since in this latter respect the opposite is true. . . . And in his [Maimonides’] opinion . . . the soul . . . is nothing but potentiality and preparation. . . . And after asking his honor for forgiveness, I say that it is the other way around. I say that the soul is a separate substance, existing for itself, attached to the body but not mixed with it.
Conceiving the intellect and God as immaterial substances raises the problem of their correspondence with the material realm. Somehow the gulf between these heterogeneous realms must be bridged, or blurred. The latter is what Maimon does here:
And in general I say that all things are images (צלמים) of the separate forms, since we know already that the image is a body of a certain shape (תמונה) done wisely to accept a supreme power adequate to this figure, since the separate [form], although it is spiritual and lacks bodily shape* [see on the asterisk below], nevertheless has some resemblance to that shape, and therefore the body done according to that shape is drawn to that shape due to the signs and the resemblance of the things.15
How can abstract “separate forms” lacking bodily form nevertheless “resemble” sensible substances? How can sensible substances be “images” (צלמים) of abstract forms? What are the “signs” by which they are coordinated? In later years Maimon would criticize Kant and ask by what signs (Merkmale) a concept is coordinated with a sensible appearance.16 But in the early Hebrew manuscripts no further explanation of the nature of the “signs” and “similarity” is attempted. However, the heterogeneity of “separate forms” and sensible appearances is clearly articulated and also the presupposition that they must somehow “resemble” each other.
In the quotation above, the asterisk refers to a note. In this note, Maimon mentions Locke and Leibniz, whom he read in Berlin, making this note a later, critical reflection on his previous views:
But all I have written here is based on the view of some of the early philosophers who say that the hylic intellect is a separate substance and something other than the apprehended [forms] (מושכלות) that are in fact received. But I now revoke this opinion of mine since in fact there is no hylic intellect or a subject other than the forms apprehended in actu.17
The position Maimon adopts in the note is evidently the basis of his later critique of Kant. The only way to answer the quid juris question in a satisfactory way is to dissolve it, i.e. to conceive of the human mind and of God as substantially the same as the sensible world. Note that Maimon ascribes here to “some of the early philosophers” the view that gives rise to the question how the mind and sensible objects are coordinated. In his German period he believes that he is encountering the same position in Kant and therefore says that the quid juris question is “one and the same as the important question that has occupied all previous philosophy.”18 The problem has changed, though. In Kant it addressed the distinction between concepts and intuitions, a priori on the one hand, and experience a posteriori, on the other. In Maimon, it addressed the distinction between an immaterial intellect and intuitions as such, whether a priori or a posteriori. What seemed to be the same problem in a “broader sense” in fact modified its meaning, such that its resolution “leads either to Spinozistic or to Leibnizian dogmatism” (231). It seems safe to say that Maimon assimilated the Kantian problem to his own philosophy, formed on the basis of traditional Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics.
Both the Leibnizian and the Spinozistic resolution of the form-matter (or understanding and intuition, concept and object) problem consist in showing that these are not different in kind. The differences between the solutions lies in this: Spinoza that supposes “one and the same substance is the immediate cause of all effects . . . Every particular effect in nature is ascribed, not to its proximate cause (which is merely a mode), but to the first cause, which is common to all beings” (63–64).19 By contrast, in Leibniz, “all specific phenomena are drawn into an immediate relation with specific causes. But the different effects are conceived of as belonging together within a single system, while the cause of the connections among the variety of things is sought in a Being that is outside the system.” (64). In both philosophies the seemingly heterogeneous realms are homogenized with reference to their common origin. The first difference between them is their relation to the sciences. Spinoza “immediately” refers all effects to a single “remote cause” (God or nature), whereas Leibniz concentrates on the “secondary causes” (which are studied by the sciences) and only gestures towards the remote first cause.
On Maimon’s reading, Spinoza continues a train of thought that begins with ancient religion. It is expressed in the tetragrammaton Yehova or in God’s answer to Moses (Exodus 3:13–14): “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh,” [I am that I am]. In his autobiography he writes that this passage “means nothing other than that the ground of Judaism is the unity of God as the immediate cause of all being; the remarkable inscription on the pyramid at Sais says as much: ‘I am everything that is, was, and will be’”(104).20 To these conceptions conforms “a single system only.” writes Maimon with an obvious allusion to Spinoza. Maimon ascribes this view of original monotheism not only to Moses and Josephus Flavius but also to the Kabbalists and Talmudists. In fact, he repeats Maimonides who claimed that “immediate” reference to God is typical of biblical monotheism, a claim that was repeated yet again by Spinoza.21
The second difference between Leibniz and Spinoza is that the first cause is transcendent according to Leibniz, immanent according to Spinoza. Maimon’s first addition to the quid juris question arises here: How can a transcendent (immaterial) intelligence create a material world (or how can an object in intuition be constructed from a concept)? In Spinoza, this problem does not arise, as there is no creation, and God and the World are one and the same.
Of course, these characterizations of “Spinoza” and “Leibniz” do not intend to do justice to either of them. The names “Spinoza” and “Leibniz” stand here for very general philosophical ideas. Spinoza stands for the slogan “All is One and One is All” used by Mendelssohn in his Morning Hours (1785). When Maimon inserted a translation of the chapters on Spinoza in Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours into his own Hebrew commentary on Maimonides’ Guide, he quoted this slogan and added that the view is very deep and agrees with Kabbalah.22
Maimon’s resolution of the quid juris question is hence squarely embedded in the context of the pantheism controversy of the 1780s. And yet, Maimon says that although he read Spinoza in Germany: “back in Poland, I had, through my reading of Kabbalistic writings, chanced upon the same ideas that underlie his system” (197). In fact, this is so! In his early manuscript Eved Avraham, we find the following super-commentary on Ibn Ezra on Exodus 23:21. Maimon writes:
Since He is all and all is from Him. You should know that there is no independent being besides Him, may He be blessed. We apprehend existent beings through the apprehension of the accidents in the substance and of the substance in the accidents. To clarify this, consider the following example of a simple element as is water. We apprehend of water its coldness and humidity which are accidents of the substance water. . . . But after apprehending these accidents by our senses, we conceive by the understanding that these accidents require a substance as their subject. We thus apprehend the substance through the accidents. And the substance of all beings is the creator, may He be blessed, and He is concealed on his own part and revealed by the aforementioned accidents, and is both the revealing and the revealed.23
In Berlin, Maimon explained (to Markus Herz) Spinozism in the very same terms. It is the doctrine that “all objects are manifestations of a single substance” (195).
H now also translated the vague notion that concept and object are not heterogeneous into a precise program. Take the allegedly synthetic “principle” of geometry, that the straight line is shortest between two points. The choice is of course not accidental. This proposition is a foremost example of synthetic judgments a priori in Kant.24 Demonstrating that concept and intuition are not heterogeneous means showing that the straight line in intuition is a sensible presentation of the concept “shortest line.” This can be done in two ways, either by a proof that the straight line is shortest, or by constructing the sensible object “straight line” from the concept “shortest line.” Maimon elaborated in detail both possibilities. As to the proof, Maimon seems to have realized that it failed. Nevertheless, he left the proof in place but added a note:
My intention here is merely to show: that according to the quoted definition of a straight line, the proposition: A straight line etc. [is the shortest between two points] is not an axiom, but a proposition analytically inferred from others. And suppose that we nevertheless finally hit on synthetic propositions on which all others are based (I leave undecided as yet whether this is the case), I nevertheless maintain that just as by means of my definition I rendered analytic this proposition which was claimed to be synthetic, I can do the same with these [synthetic propositions] too.25
The claim that truths of intuition are presentations of conceptual truths does not mean that we already possess analytic proofs of all of them. It rather means that we have good reasons (and some good examples) to believe that such a “research program” is viable, although it may be infinite. However, Maimon could present no such example.
Another way to demonstrate that concept and intuition are not heterogeneous is to construct a straight line from its concept. Such construction has ramifications for the quid juris question “in the broader sense.” It demonstrates that an “intelligence” (a power of concepts) may create a material world (objects in intuition):
God, as an infinite power of representation, from all eternity, thinks himself as all possible essences, that is, he thinks himself as restricted in every possible way. He does not think as we do, [namely], discursively; rather, his thoughts are at one and the same time presentations (Darstellungen). If someone objects that we have no concept of such a style of thinking, my answer is: We do in fact have a concept of it, since we partly have this style in our possession. All mathematical concepts are thought by us and at the same time exhibited as real objects through construction a priori. Thus, we are in this respect similar to God.26
We may think that God creates a material world in the same way as we construct geometrical objects in intuition. However, do we really construct from concepts objects in intuition? Initially, this seems evident and easily comprehensible:
As soon as the understanding prescribes the rule for drawing a line between two points (that is, that it should be the shortest), the imagination draws a straight line to satisfy this demand.27
Maimon here repeats Kant, who said that we draw a line by the motion of a point in pure intuition. But Kant did not say by what rule we guarantee that this line is “straight.” And in fact, there was no such rule. Another problem concerns continuity. To construct a continuous line we must construct infinitely many points, and this is impossible. To imagine that a moving point traces a continuous line in space means simply to hide the problem of continuity behind “motion” and, moreover, to acknowledge the authority of the imagination over the understanding. Thus, whereas the construction of objects in intuition allows us to discover properties not contained in the concepts, it also demonstrates the subjection of the understanding to the alien rule of the imagination:
The understanding prescribes the productive imagination a rule to produce a space enclosed by three lines. The imagination obeys and constructs the triangle, but lo and behold! three angles, which the understanding did not at all demand, impose themselves. Now the understanding suddenly becomes clever since it learned the connection between three sides and three angles hitherto unknown to it, but the reason of which remains unknown to it. Hence it makes a virtue of necessity, puts on a imperious expression and says: A triangle must have three angles!—as if it were here the legislator whereas in fact it must obey an unknown legislator.28
The heterogeneity of concept and intuition thus remains in place and so does Kant’s quid juris question. Moreover, Kant took for granted that there are synthetic judgments a priori and only asked how they were possible. Maimon argued that we have no such judgments. Synthetic judgments are not a priori and certain but experiential and probable only.
Maimon’s own and mature solution of the quid juris question conceives understanding and sensibility as one in kind but on opposite ends of a continuum with an infinite distance between them. At the end of a précis of the history of philosophy that introduces his Hebrew commentary on Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimon succinctly presents his own philosophy:
And I, the author, having learned from books and studied with God’s help the science of philosophy, found that the objects of philosophy are the elements (יסודות) of sensible objects, not the sensible objects themselves. And we apply the logical forms not to the sensible objects as such but to their elements, which are the infinitely small parts from which the sensible bodies are composed, and which are themselves concepts of the understanding notwithstanding their being the elements of the sensible objects. And I believe that this is the very same view of the philosopher Leibniz. The sensibles are by their nature infinitely divisible since the [sensible] forms of their cognition (השגה) are time and extension which allow infinite division. But the elements of the sensibles conceived by the intellect abstracted from time and space, are the indivisible individuals that he mentioned. And the intellect cannot conceive any ratio and relation among the sensibles, since the sensibles are not the objects of its cognition. But it conceives the ratio and the relations among the elements of the sensibles, and only these are the individuals spoken of. However, by its nature, the imagination cannot conceive these individuals. And therefore these ratio and relation are taken by it [the imagination] to hold among the sensibles themselves that are the objects of its cognition.29
The truth of the matter is hence first a complete dichotomy between continuous objects of sensibility and discrete objects of the understanding. And yet, these have a common border, and exactly on this border are the “infinitely small parts,” which are “concepts of the understanding notwithstanding their being the elements of the sensible objects.” In Leibniz, too, says Maimon, the monadology is correlated with the infinitesimal calculus. The difference between them is nevertheless important. Maimon conceives the infinitesimal element of sensible bodies as “without any finite extension, although not as a mathematical but rather as a physical point, or as the differential of an extension.”30 He refers at this place to Leibniz, but in Leibniz, the monads are “metaphysical points” and therefore heterogeneous with sensible bodies. Conceiving of the elements as “physical points” establishes homogeneity between “concepts of the understanding” and “elements of the sensible objects”—and therefore the possibility of applying concepts to intuitions—although they are infinitely distant from one another. The metaphysical and the physical world are not separated: the metaphysical realm is the limit of the physical.
The reason why these ideas are attractive is obvious. The solution of the quid juris question (in the wide sense) is here continuous with the most advanced mathematical and physical theories of the time: with the infinitesimal calculus and with analytic mechanics and its concept of the “point mass” of zero extension but non-zero mass. The challenge is also obvious: can something be both a concept and an element of a sensible body?
Although Maimon himself remarked that elucidating philosophical notions by means of the calculus may appear to be an attempt to clarify the obscure by what is even more obscure, there is an enormous difference between an obscurity in the foundations of the calculus (the validity of which nobody doubted) and the obscurity of muddled thought. In fact, leading contemporary mathematicians conceived the calculus exactly in the same terms as Maimon. The formulation of the alleged conceptual “obscurity” of ontology in the language of the calculus was in itself a major philosophical achievement.
Maimon’s conception of the “differential” is, of course, squarely embedded in the discourse of the eighteenth century, as was his discussion of Spinozism. And yet, here too, it has medieval roots. In The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimon’s primary source of philosophy in Lithuania, Maimonides presents the philosophy of the Kalam (an Islamic school that flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries) in twelve principles, which he discusses in detail. The first principle states that all bodies of the world are composed of “very small particles that, because of their subtlety, are not subject to division. The individual particle does not possess quantity in any respect. However, when several are aggregated, their aggregate possesses quantity and has thus become a body.”31 Maimonides presents some of the paradoxes that follow from the assumption that reality is composed of discrete atoms while space is continuous, especially the propositions referring to rational and irrational magnitudes in book 10 of Euclid’s Elements. The implication is that geometry (the mathematics of continuous magnitude) would be at odds with reality.
In his commentary on the Guide, Maimon sides with the Kalam against Maimonides, but also introduces some new ideas to “further improve” Kalam philosophy, first the distinction between extensive and intensive magnitudes. The elements have no extensive magnitude but possess intensive magnitude, namely varying degrees of the force of representation (like Leibniz’s monads). He adds the distinction between aggregation and chemical synthesis, and, finally, the notion of the “infinitesimal” itself.32 In short, Maimon interprets the atoms of Kalam as his own differentials. Maimon’s construal is not substituting one philosophy for another. It is rather a benevolent interpretation and improvement of Kalam ontology.
In spite of Maimon’s Leibnizian leanings, there is a clear difference between his critique of Kant and that proffered by Leibniz’s followers. Their main point of criticism was that Kant didn’t name a “principle” that governs synthetic judgments a priori and guarantees their necessity. Given the concept of the subject, say “triangle,” the principle should have determined its true predicates, say that the sum of its internal angles equals two right angles. Kant himself didn’t think that synthetic judgments a priori require a “principle.” He rather explained their possibility by the cooperation of the understanding and intuition, both in a priori and empirical propositions:
[ . . . ]for just as empirical intuition makes it possible for us, without difficulty, to amplify (synthetically in experience) the concept we form of an object of intuition through new predicates that are presented by intuition itself, so too will pure intuition do the same only with this difference: that in the latter case the synthetic judgment will be a priori certain and apodictic.33
Maimon’s Principle of Determinability is not a principle by which such judgments are inferred from the concept of the subject, as the Leibnizians demanded. It is merely a criterion of well-formed propositions. A real synthesis consists of a subject and a predicate. The subject is a concept that can be thought by itself without the predicate, the predicate cannot be thought without the subject concept. “A straight line” is such a synthesis. A line can be thought (not imagined!) without the property straight, but straight cannot be thought without a subject (line). If the subject and the predicate can be thought independently of each other (“yellow” and “malleable”—two properties of gold), their alleged synthesis is merely an arbitrary combination (combined because they are observed to exist in the same place and time), not a synthesis. If it is not empirically based, such combination might produce nonsense (for example, “a sweet line”).34 A “real synthesis” is characterized by new properties that are neither properties of the subject nor of the predicate but of the synthesis itself. Note the agreement between this characterization and that of a chemical “compound” as distinguished from a “mixture.” For example, in a right-angled triangle the sum of the squares on its sides equals the square on the hypotenuse. This is neither a predicate of “triangle” nor of “right-angled” but only of their synthesis.35
The Principle of Determinability is the “supreme principle of all real knowledge that determines objects.”36 As a principle of (transcendental) logic, it rigorously applies to concepts that are homogeneous with it, not to sensible bodies. This is Maimon’s answer to the quid juris challenge. Therefore the principle applies directly to differentials as concepts and indirectly to sensible objects that are constituted by such differentials as their elements.37
It should be noted that a well-formed synthesis need not have a referent. For example, a decahedron, the synthesis of a solid with ten equal faces, cannot be constructed. The synthesis is legitimate, but not real.38 The Principle of Determinability neither generates truth, nor is it a criterion of truth. It is merely a criterion of well-formed syntheses. In spite of all his efforts to develop a method of invention, Maimon confined himself to the much more modest achievement of the Principle of Determinability.
Kant’s world is famously split into two realms: The realm of experience and that of “things-in-themselves.” In Maimon there is no such duality: things-in-themselves are the “limits” of our knowledge of sensible objects. However, the properties predicated of them at the limit are sometimes contrary to each other, as the paradoxes of the infinite show. Since they are paradoxical, such properties cannot be real. If their concepts are indispensable, we use them with the caveat that they are “fictitious.”
Discrete differentials and continuous matter and space are related to each other as true reality and appearance, but also opposed to each other as “reality” and “fiction.” This is so because there are two major ways of proceeding from appearance to reality, the way of the understanding and the way of the imagination. The first formulates a rule of progression, the second imagines an existent last member of the series. We can follow a rule of the understanding towards the “differential” as a limit of ratios (dy/dx) or follow the imagination and assert the existence of a least element “differential” or “infinitesimal” (dy, dx). We can conceive a number as a ratio determined by its place in a series or imagine it as a collection of units. Similarly, we can proceed towards an ever more general concept or assert that an all-encompassing origin exists. The similarity to Kant’s notions of “antinomies” and “ideas” is obvious. However, what in Kant is a conflict within reason is in Maimon a conflict between reason and the imagination.
The fictitious character of a notion increases in proportion to the share of the imagination in apprehension. Since all real human knowledge involves imagination to some extent, all knowledge is also fictitious to some degree. “Fiction” in Maimon spans from the continuity of geometrical lines, “imaginary numbers” and “differentials” (or “infinitesimals”) in mathematics, over “force” and “compound motion” in physics, to “monads,” “God,” and “immortality” in metaphysics. These concepts are indispensable but may not claim reference. A similar problem arises concerning causality in general. Even if causality is objective, this does not determine any specific application of this concept to experience. We know specific causal relations only from experience, and we might ascribe necessary causal relations to objects that merely display some regularity only. With this Humean skepticism remains in place. Moreover, if the claims that there are synthetic judgments a priori are refuted, their possibility need not concern us, and Kant’s (but not Maimon’s) quid juris question is empty.39 “Our knowledge,” Maimon writes, “is partly pure and partly real. Unfortunately, however, the pure isn’t real, and the real isn’t pure”(238).
Maimon’s “glosses on and clarifications of” Kant amount to a radical critique that denies Kant’s revolution in philosophy and claims to further improve on him on the basis of Leibniz and Hume. We have also seen that Maimon’s “misunderstanding” of Kant’s quid juris question closely followed his early metaphysical-kabbalistic manuscripts, which also include a clear formulation of his later “Spinozism.” Finally, Maimon’s interpretation of Kant’s “Schematism” is understandable on the basis of the search for “signs” (Merkmale) and “resemblance” that coordinate the intellectual and the sensible realms in his early manuscripts.
We have also witnessed Maimon’s reading of Medieval philosophy with eyes informed by modern philosophy: He “improved” on Kalam ontology with the infinitesimal calculus and with the introduction of the concept of the chemical “compound” and, finally, with Leibniz’s monadology. This may help understand the nature of a “commentary” such as Maimon’s. It is not an attempt to elucidate a text but rather to “further improve” philosophical conceptions by assimilation of new knowledge and arguments. The reciprocate “commentary” of modern philosophy and traditional metaphysics (in addition, of course, to Maimon’s genius) is the basis of his innovative and singular position in the philosophy of the eighteenth century.
1 Lazarus Bendavid, “Über Salomon Maimon, ” in National-Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Gewerbe in den Preußischen Staaten, Bd. 1 (1801), pp. 88–104, here: 93.
2 Salomon Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Valerio Verra (Hildesheim, 1970), 4:384.
3 All contained in the convolute Hesheq Shelomo, not yet published and kept at the National Library in Jerusalem. Heb 8° 6426.
4 Maimon, GW, 4:241.
5 Maimon, Versuch über die Transscendentalphilosophie mit einem Anhang über die symbolische Erkenntniß und Anmerkungen von Salomon Maimon, aus Litthauen in Polen (Berlin, 1790), p. 334.
6 Maimon to Fichte, Berlin, October 16, 1794. Maimon, GW, 6:449–50.
7 Kant, CpR, A713/B741.
8 Maimon, GW, 6:424, my emphasis.
9 Maimon, VT, pp. 61–63 and 362.
10 Maimon, GW, 7:568. See also pp. 390 and 669 in the same volume.
11 Maimon, VT, pp. 360–62.
12 Kant, CpR, A138/B177.
13 Kant, CpR, A144/B187.
14 See also Maimon, VT, 37.
15 Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, p. 125.
16 VT, 60–70.
17 Hesheq Shelomo, p. 124.
18 Maimon, VT, pp. 61–63.
19 See also GH, p. 161.
20 Maimon, Autobiography, p. 196.
21 Maimonides, Guide, bk. 2, ch. 48; Spinoza, TTP, I:6.
22 Maimon, GH, p. 161.
23 Maimon, Eved Avraham, Hesheq Shelomo, p. 81.
24 Kant, CpR, B16; Prolegomena § 20 | AA 4:301–2.
25 Maimon, VT, pp. 66–67.
26 Maimon, GW, 4:42.
27 Maimon, VT, p. 19.
28 Maimon, GW, 3:185–201; see also GW, 4:449–50.
29 Maimon, GH, p. 18. See also VT, 9, 186, 192, 355–56.
30 Maimon, VT, p. 27–28; see also GW 4:53.
31 Maimonides, Guide 1:73 | Pines 1:195.
32 GH, p. 126–27.
33 Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science (1783), trans. Gary Hatfield in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, eds. Henry Allison and Peter Heath (Cambridge, 2001), p. 281. Emphasis mine.
34 VT, 92–93; VT, 124–25; Logik, 435.
35 Euclid, Elements, bk. 1, prop. 47; VT, 243.
36 Maimon, GW, 7:203; VT, 84–97; Logik, 20; 309–11.
37 VT, 355.
38 Logik, 18, 312.
39 See Maimon, GW, 4:210–11 and 225–26, 229.