Striving for Intellectual Growth amidst the Eternal Struggle against All Kinds of Misery
THANKS TO THE LESSONS MY FATHER had given me, but thanks even more to my own diligence, I made so much progress that even as an eleven year old I could perform the role of rabbi. In addition, I had acquired some desultory knowledge of history, as well as of astronomy and other mathematical sciences.
I had a very burning desire to gain even more knowledge. But given my lack of guidance, of scholarly books, and of all the other necessary means, how could I achieve my goal? I thus had to content myself with proceeding randomly, without a plan. I had to content myself with making use of whatever knowledge I happened to pick up. [121]
The only way to satisfy my desire for scholarly knowledge was to study foreign languages. But how was I to begin? Studying Polish or Latin with a Catholic would have been impossible, for the prejudices of my own people prohibited the study of any language except Hebrew. The same prejudices also kept me from seeking out any scholarly knowledge and scientific learning that wasn’t in the Talmud or the innumerable commentaries on it. The prejudices of the Catholics, for their part, were such that no Jew could be taught in their midst.
Beyond all that, I had little free time. I had to support a whole family with my work as a schoolmaster, by proofreading copies of the Holy Scripture, and so on. For quite some time, I could only sigh over the frustrated state of my natural drive.
Finally, a stroke of good luck came to my aid. I noticed that some very thick Hebrew books [122] contained several different alphabets, and that they were so long that the number of pages exceeded the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Other characters in a second or third alphabet, generally Latin and German letters, had to be used for designating page numbers.
Now I didn’t know a thing about printing. I imagined that books were printed like a canvas, that a special form was created and printed onto every page. I surmised, though, that the characters placed next to one another represented equivalent letters, and because I had heard something about the order of the alphabets in question, I was able to deduce that, for example, the a next to the א had to be an alpha as well. In this way, I gradually learned the Latin and German alphabets.
Through a kind of deciphering, I began to combine different German letters into words. Yet it remained an open question [123] whether all my effort would be futile, for the German characters next to the Hebrew letters might well have been different from those letters. My doubts persisted until I had more good luck: Several pages from an old German book happened to fall into my hands.
I started to read it, and how great was my joy and astonishment when I was able recognize from context that the meanings of the words completely matched the words I had already learned. There were quite a few words I was unable to translate into my native Yiddish, but even skipping those words, I was able to use the context to reach a plausible understanding of the whole.
This method of learning through deciphering remains my method for grasping and judging the thoughts of others. Indeed, I would argue, you cannot say that you have understood a book as long as you’re compelled merely to present the author’s ideas in their original order, in the language employed by the author himself. That is simply [124] memory. You can boast of having understood an author only when, prompted by thoughts of his that at first you could grasp only dimly, you are moved to bring forth his ideas as though for yourself, despite following his lead. A sharp eye will not fail to appreciate the distinction being drawn here. For the same reason, I feel I have comprehended a book only when, after I fill in its gaps, all its ideas cohere with one another.1
Still, I felt an inner longing that I wasn’t able to quiet. My desire for scientific and scholarly knowledge was still not fully satisfied. Up until then, Talmudic study had been my main pursuit, but I had enjoyed it only with respect to its form, since form activates the highest powers of the intellect. Its content had given me no pleasure at all. Talmudic study forces one to practice drawing the remotest conclusions from a set of principles; to uncover the most obscure contradictions; [125] to make the finest distinctions. But because the principles themselves have only imaginary reality, studying the Talmud cannot satisfy the truly curious soul.
And so in this state of privation, I looked for ways to overcome the lack of substance. Now, I happened to know about a kind of systematic knowledge, a so-called science, very popular among the Jewish scholars in my region, namely the Kabbalah, which promised not only to satisfy my hunger for knowledge, but also to make possible an extraordinary degree of self-perfection that would bring one closer to God.
Naturally, I had an intense desire for this knowledge. But since the Kabbalah, because of its holiness, is pursued in private, not taught publicly, I didn’t know how to track down its initiates and their writings. [126]
1 The last paragraph is a succinct statement of the method of rational reconstruction in the study of the history of philosophy. It may not be a coincidence that Martial Gueroult (1891–76), one of the leading twentieth-century proponents of the method, wrote his dissertation and first book on Maimon, La Philosophie Transcendentale de Salomon Maimon (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1929).