MAIMONIDES’ NON-KANTIAN MORAL PSYCHOLOGY:

Maimonides and Kant on the Garden of Eden and the Genealogy

of Morals1

Heidi M. Ravven

Hamilton College

Immanuel Kant, and not only Moses Maimonides, wrote a

fairly lengthy interpretive essay on the Genesis text of

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. For both philosophers

the biblical story served as an opportunity to address the

genealogy of morals. And the two treatments give the reader

insight into the philosophers’ respective philosophical

anthropologies, that is to say, into their assessments of

what the human person is and how human psychology, and

sociology, for that matter, operate. They also have

something to say about the desired end of human history and,

to some extent, where we are now. While for Maimonides,

the philosophical anthropology presented in the

interpretation of Adam is front and center in the Guide,

Kant’s anthropological writings are less central to his

1

corpus, that kind of narrative and historical reflection

perhaps having a more ambiguous status in the Kantian

philosophy than the Maimonidean and largely absent from the

Critiques. Nevertheless in his 1786 essay, “Conjectural

Beginning of Human History,” an essay that he wrote in his

maturity at age 62, and published in Berlinishe Monatsschrift,

Kant answered his former student Herder’s interpretation of

the Garden of Eden in the latter’s Ideas for the philosophy of

history of humanity, which started coming out in 1784. And to do

that he proposed an alternative interpretation of the

Genesis history that is expressive of his own philosophy of

history as well as quite revealing of some deeply held

beliefs about human beings. While both Herder and Kant

were indebted to and inspired by Rousseau, their use of

1 This paper owes a debt to my extended treatment of Maimonides on the

Garden of Eden in my article, “The Garden of Eden: Spinoza’s Maimonidean

Account of the Genealogy of Morals and the Origin of Society” Philosophy

and Theology, Volume 13, Number 1 (2001). It also owes a debt to some of

the issues raised in my extended treatment of Maimonides on prophecy,

“Some Thoughts on What Spinoza Learned from Maimonides about the

Prophetic Imagination,” The Journal of the History of Philosophy (two-part article

serialized in the April and July, 2001 issues: Volume XXIX, Numbers 3 &

4)

2

Rousseau displayed a marked contrast. Herder’s

interpretation of Eden was that human beings began in a

natural condition of harmony with nature and with each

other. As long as they remained close to their spiritual

origins and under the tutelage of the various divine

traditions, all was well. But when they aspired to become

like the Elohim, which Herder translates in the plural, the

knowledge of evil gained was to their own detriment. It was

a knowledge eventually leading to the corruptions of

advanced civilization. For in deracinating themselves from

their natural origin and introducing the artificiality of a

civilized life in a political community that can be

maintained only by war and state power, human beings

introduced degeneration into their originally idyllic world.

Herder comments that “it was a benevolent thought of

providence to give the more easily attained happiness of

individual human beings priority over the artificial ends of

large societies.” For God’s plan for the human species was

a life of harmonious innocent contentment.2

3

It is this picture of Eden and its implied vision of

the good life for human beings that Kant objects to and

writes his self-designated “exercise of the imagination” to

combat. He writes in introducing the essay that, although

“conjectures cannot make too high a claim on one’s assent”

and “cannot announce themselves as serious business,”

nevertheless, they are “a permissible exercise of the

imagination guided by reason, undertaken for the sake of

relaxation and mental health.” Kant contrasts this present

speculative endeavor with the more serious task of history

writing.3 Nevertheless, he concludes that:

Precisely because of this difference, and because

I here venture on a mere pleasure trip, I may hope

to be favored with the permission to use, as a map

2 The description of Herder’s account of Eden from his Ideas for the

philosophy of history of humanity is adapted from Allen W. Wood’s account of it

in Kant’s Ethical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 227 –28. The

quotation is from p. 228.3 Maimonides will also treat the Garden of Eden as conjectural and to be

interpreted as an allegory with no historical basis, and Adam not as a

historical figure as Moses and Abraham are, for example. I am indebted

to Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson of Arizona State University for

reminding me of the story’s status for Maimonides. See below.

4

for my trip, a sacred document; and also to fancy

that my trip –undertaken on the wings of the

imagination, albeit not without a clue rationally

derived from experience—may take the very route

sketched out in that document. Let the reader

consult it (Gen. 2 – 6) and check at every point

whether the road which philosophy takes with the

help of concepts coincides with the story told in

Holy Writ.4

So Kant’s final words on how we as readers are to assess

what he is saying here in fact claim more for the essay than

his initial lighthearted dismissal would have us believe.

Allen Wood, in both his book on Kant’s Ethical Theory and in his

article on this essay –the only extant treatment that I am

aware of of Kant on the Garden of Eden, at least in English—

takes this and the anthropological writings very seriously

and urges readers to do the same. In fact, Wood subtitles 4 All quotations from Kant’s “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”

are taken from Emil Fackenheim’s English translation to be found in the

volume, On History: Immanuel Kant, edited by Lewis White Beck, Library of

Liberal Arts published by Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis and New York,

1963).

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his essay “The Anthropological Basis of Kantian Ethics.”

Wood proposes also in his book that Kant’s reasons for how

he understands reason in relation to desire “are not derived

a priori from [his] conceptions of metaphysics or morality

but are empirical and anthropological in character.”5 In

the final words of commentary in his article devoted to

Kant’s essay, Wood again focuses our attention on the

importance, often neglected, of Kant’s philosophical

anthropology. Kant raises in his “Conjectural Beginning,”

Wood remarks, “issues about human nature and its historical

destiny, falling entirely outside the scope of a Kantian

‘metaphysics of morals’, [and] belonging instead to a

critical examination of the anthropological foundations of

Kantian moral theory. We cannot begin to evaluate these

foundations, however,” Woods pleads, “until we have first

admitted their existence, and that requires us to overcome

some traditional ways of looking at Kantian ethics.”6

5 Kant’s Ethical Theory, p. 250 Wood may have moderated this position some in

his later writings on Kant’s philosophy of religion.6 Allen W. Wood, “Unsociable Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of

Kantian Ethics” Philosophical Topics, vol. 19, no. 1, spring,1991

6

Kant remarks that his “sole purpose [in retelling the

Eden story] is to consider the development of manners and

morals [des Sittlichen] in [the human] way of life.”7 Kant says

that it is important that the first person is an adult and

has not “the help of a mother,” that it is a pair so that

there can be a human race, and perhaps most important that

it is only a pair so that no social conditions have yet

arisen. This is a time prior to society. Adam is not in an

entirely primitive state, however, because he can stand and

walk and “even speak according to coherent concepts, and

think.”8 Nevertheless, Adam, Kant says, “is guided by

instinct alone, that voice of God which is obeyed by all

animals.”9 And at this point we discover a reminiscence of

Herder but also a difference. For Kant goes on to say that

“as long as inexperienced man obeyed this call of nature all

was well with him. But soon reason began to stir” and the

beauty, harmony, and pleasure of human natural existence

vanishes. For reason suggested comparisons between foods

and awakened the desire for “foodstuffs beyond the bounds of

instinctual knowledge.”10 Now Kant introduces an important

7

distinction: The entry of reason had it been compatible with

instinct might have enhanced human harmony with the natural

world rather than interfered with it. But instead reason,

especially when aided by the imagination, “can create

artificial desires which are not only unsupported by natural

instinct but actually contrary to it.”11 For Kant Adam’s

choice of a fruit against instinct, because it may have

appeared to his reason similar to tasty fruits but was in

fact naturally harmful and therefore resisted by his

instinct, marks the human person’s “first attempt at

becoming conscious of his reason as a power which can extend

itself beyond the limits to which all animals are

confined.”12 And so Adam’s action is understood by Kant as

the first occasion of “reason [doing] violence to the voice

of nature (3:1), and [nature’s] protest not withstanding,

and … the first attempt at free choice.”

Despite the triviality, perhaps, of the choice in

question, Kant remarks that “it sufficed to open man’s eyes

(3:7). He discovered for himself a power of choosing for

himself a way of life, of not being bound without

8

alternative to a single way, like the animals.” Kant goes on

to describe the human condition initiated by Adam.

He stood, as it were, at the brink of an

abyss. Until that moment instinct had directed

him toward specific objects of desire. But from

these there now opened up an infinity of such

objects, and he did not yet know how to choose

between them. On the other hand, it was

impossible for him to return to the state of

servitude (i.e., subjection to instinct) from the

state of freedom, once he had tasted the latter.13

Adam goes on to discover that sexual desire can be enhanced

by reason and imagination. That’s his interpretation of the

meaning of the fig leaf (3:7), as an enhancement of sexual

allure, one that represents, he writes, “a far greater 7 Conjectural Beginning, p. 558 Conjectural Beginning, pp. 54 - 559 Conjectural Beginning, p. 5510 Conjectural Beginning, p. 5511 Conjectural Beginning, p. 5612 Conjectural Beginning, p. 5613 Conjectural Beginning, p. 56

9

manifestation of reason than that shown in the earlier stage

of development,” namely, that of the eating of the fruit.

The fig leaf, he goes on, already represents a certain

mastery of reason over impulse in its refusal and

manipulation of immediate instinctual desire towards

desire’s enhancement but also toward desire’s

spiritualization. “Refusal”, Kant writes, “was the feat which

brought about the passage from sensual [empfundenen] to

spiritual [idealischen] attractions, from mere animal desire

gradually to love, and along with this from the feeling of

the merely agreeable to a taste for beauty.” But most

important “there came a first hint at the development of man

as a moral creature. This came from the sense of decency

[Sittsamkeit], which is an inclination to inspire others to

respect by proper manners.”14 Although small, Kant calls

this beginning “epoch making” and more important than all

the advances in culture that subsequently sprang from it.15

These (that is, choice as the initiation of freedom and then

14 Conjectural Beginning, p. 5715 Conjectural Beginning, p. 57

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instinctual self-regulation) are the first two stages of

reason’s coming on the scene. The third stage, Kant says,

is the capacity to envision the future, which is in his view

“the most decisive mark of the human’s advantage.”16 But

this brought with it fear and anxiety for the future and

also the fear of death. This is the inherent punishment of

being fully human and hence Adam and Eve in Kant’s words,

“apparently foreswore and decried as a crime the use of

reason, which had been the cause of all these ills,”17

hence, the Bible’s depiction of the use of reason as a

rebellion or perhaps in Kant’s understanding, sin. Kant

remarks, later on in the essay, on Adam’s “abuse of reason

in the very first use of reason.”18

But there was yet a fourth stage to reason’s

development, according to Kant’s reading of the story, and

that was reason’s entry as the rightful mastery of nature.

This “fourth and final step which reason took,” Kant

concludes, “raised man altogether above community with the 16 Conjectural Beginning, pp. 57 - 5817 Conjectural Beginning, p. 5818 Conjectural Beginning, p. 68

11

animals.” For “he came to understand, however obscurely,

that he is the true end of nature.”19 Adam realizes that

“his nature [has] privileged and raised him above all

animals. And from then on he looked upon them, no longer as

fellow creatures, but as mere means and tools to whatever

ends he pleased.”20 And at the same time, the first person

has recognition that all fellow human beings share his

status and are “equal participant[s] in the gifts of

nature.” This latter understanding is the true beginning of

morals and the basis for the establishment of a civil

society. Kant remarks that, “Thus man had entered into a

relation of equality with all rational beings, whatever

their ranks (3:22), with respect to the claim of being an

end in himself, respected as such by everyone, a being which

no one might treat as a mere means to ulterior ends.” And

“this is because of his reason, … reason makes him an end in

himself. Hence,” Kant concludes, “this last step of reason

is, at the same time, man’s release from the womb of nature.”

19 Conjectural Beginning, p. 5820 Conjectural Beginning, p. 58

12

And womb it is. For reason, rather than bringing the

promise of human fulfillment in the joy of its exercise in

eudaimonia, instead initiates restlessness, toil, and

dissatisfaction. According to Kant,

Restless reason [interposes] itself,

irresistibly impelling [Adam] to develop the

faculties implanted within him. It [will] not

permit him to return to that crude and simple

state from which it had driven him to begin with

(3:24). It [makes] him take up patiently the toil

which he yet hates, and pursue the frippery which

he despises. It [makes] him forget even death

itself which he dreads, because of all those

trifles which he is even more afraid to lose.21

Nevertheless, this life of toil and dread, and also

tremendous social conflict emerging from envy and

competition brought on by comparison of self to others, Kant

also regards as “nothing less than progress toward

perfection.”22 Allen Wood remarks again and again (and

21 Conjectural Beginning, p. 59

13

hence the title of his essay, “Unsociable Sociability”) that

it is the conflicts brought on by the exercise of reason in

a social context that make life so hard for the individual,

but, at the same time, it is these conflicts that are the

engine of progress for the human race. Because of the

hardship and especially because of social envy and ambition,

this first step toward perfection in Adam’s instituting of

the conflict between our rationality and our animality in

all its power is at the same time a fall, Kant points out.

And so it is the beginning of morality and at the same time

its violation. Kant remarks that we see in the Eden story

that “the history of nature therefore begins with good, for

it is the work of God, while the history of freedom begins

with wickedness, for it is the work of man.”23 These two

human dispositions, “man as animal” and “the other … man as

a moral species,” as Kant calls them, are given to us for

two different purposes. They come to shape human history and

also project its end. Kant appends a final section to his

“Conjectural Beginning of Human History” titled, “The End of

History.” Here he speculates about the progress of history

14

through stages of more complex political and economic

institutions and urbanization with a concomitant growth of

conflict and inequality, reason’s dark underbelly, with the

“result … that the human species is irresistibly turned away

from the task assigned to it by nature, the progressive

cultivation of its disposition to goodness. Thus the human

species became unworthy of its destiny, which is not to live

in brutish pleasure or slavish servitude, but to rule over

the earth (6:17),” Kant concludes.24

In a Concluding Remark, Kant gives us this tenuous

ground for hope, however:

In the present state of human culture, then, war

is an indispensable means to the still further

development of human culture. Only in a state of

perfect culture would perpetual peace be of

benefit to us, and only then would it be possible.

But God alone knows when this will be achieved.25

22 Conjectural Beginning, p. 6023 Conjectural Beginning, p. 6024 Conjectural Beginning, p. 6525 Conjectural Beginning, p. 67

15

Any hope of a Golden Age of “universal contentment with the

mere satisfaction of natural needs” and of “universal human

equality and perpetual peace,” a “Robinson Crusoe” world,

Kant calls it, is neither desirable nor possible. Therefore

we have to live with the troublesome aftermath of Adam’s

choice, which we, nevertheless, can only ascribe firmly to

our own free choice. Kant ends the essay thus:

This, then, is the lesson taught by a

philosophical attempt to write the most ancient

part of human history: contentment with

Providence, and with the course of human affairs,

considered as a whole. For this course is not a

decline from good to evil, but rather a gradual

development from the worse to the better; and

nature itself has given the vocation to everyone

to contribute as much to this progress as may be

within his power.26

Rather than analyzing Kant’s moral psychology at this

point, let’s go on to a brief review of Maimonides’ account

26 Conjectural Beginning, p. 68

16

of Adam’s fall in the Guide to the Perplexed. We shall defer a

comparison of the respective anthropologies and moral and

social psychologies till the end. The purpose of the

comparison is not to illustrate that Kant and Maimonides had

contrasting interpretations of the Garden of Eden. That

goes without saying. What we are looking for is the

underlying philosophical anthropology, and moral and social

psychology. Where do they coincide and where do they

diverge? Maimonides treats the Garden of Eden at some

length in two chapters, first in Part I, chapter 2 and later

in Part II, chapter 30. In the latter treatment the context

is that of a discussion of Creation and Maimonides contrasts

the underlying scientific meaning and reference of the

biblical account of the six days of Creation to the merely

fanciful status of the subsequent Garden narrative. This is

a different account in a different literary genre,

Maimonides suggests, for the biblical text, he says,

concludes its account of Creation in remarking that “’heaven

and earth were finished and all the host of them’.”

Moreover, Maimonides reminds us that the human person had

17

already been created, “’Male and Female created He them”

and so the Eden story, he says, “makes a new start (patah

petah ehad) regarding the creation of Adam and Eve”27 and

this account, Maimonides explicitly points out, is not

chronological nor historical, and thus does not take place

after Creation as the order of the biblical text would on a

superficial reading seem to imply. Not only does he claim

that this is his own interpretation but he lends authority

to his claim in bringing to our attention that the Sages

unanimously hold that the Garden of Eden story does not

occur after Creation as it appears to on the face of it but

in fact is subsumed in the 6th day. “Now all the Sages,”

Maimonides writes, “are unanimous that all this story

occurred on Friday and that nothing was changed in any

respect after the six days of the Beginning” … so that “up till then

no permanent nature had come about.”28 The underlying

significance of this is that nature and human nature are

established within the cycle of Creation and, contra-

27 Pines, p. 35328 Pines, p. 353

18

Christianity, human nature –nor nature as such-- is not

changed for the worse by Adam’s disobedience. Instead, the

Garden of Eden story tells us something about human nature

as God established it and intended it to be from and in the

beginning.

The Garden of Eden tale, Maimonides elaborates,

functions as an allegory whose interpretation is near the

surface rather than deeply hidden and the Sages acknowledged

it as such:

Know that these things that I shall mention

to you from the dicta of the Sages are sayings of

utmost perfection; their allegorical

interpretation was clear to those to whom they

were addressed, and they are unambiguous. Hence I

will not go too far in interpreting them.29

A bit further on Maimonides again points to the allegorical

status of the Eden story when he remarks that the Sages do

not interpret the biblical words about God taking the man

and putting him in the Garden of Eden to mean that, “He took

29 Pines, p. 353

19

him away from one place and put him in another, but that He

raised the rank of his existence among the existents that

came into being and pass away and established him in a

certain state.”30 Hence clearly for Maimonides the action

in the story is not to be taken literally and historically

but rather, he implies, symbolically. The Torah is offering

us in the Garden of Eden tale not a chronology of a

historical personage, and certainly not a ‘Fall’, but a

symbolic narrative representation of an abstract analysis of

human nature both in its inception and for all time, that

is, of the ideal proper to the human species and of how that

ideal ought to be approached given the human existential

condition, social situation, and fleshly constitution.

Kant’s story seems to function similarly as a conveying an

ideal and setting its achievement within the vicissitudes of

actual human conditions. But Kant also includes a stab at a

philosophy of history emergent from his reading of Eden and

its aftermath.

30 Pines, p. 357

20

In Chapter 2 of the first part of the Guide,

Maimonides elaborates on what the conception of human nature

is that the Garden of Eden story intends to convey. And he

does this by posing his analysis as a response to a

challenger who offers an alternative construal of human

nature as derived from the biblical text. The objector

proposes that the story of the Garden of Eden means that the

Bible envisions the ideal human being as anti-intellectual

for knowledge is given to him as a curse rather than as a

blessing. So in this chapter Maimonides proposes to take up

the challenge put to him “years ago,” he says, by an unnamed

“learned man.”31 Maimonides thus poses his interpretation

as a double defense of the biblical text against the charge

first, that Adam’s disobedience is rewarded rather than

punished by being given knowledge; and second, that if this

is indeed a punishment the Bible is nevertheless not

condemning knowledge and intellect. The objector raises the

challenge that the moral of the story would seem to be that

21

Adam was better off in his original condition, when he was,

as the objector puts it, “like the beasts, devoid of

intellect,” than he is in his final condition having gained

the capacity for rational thought (the knowledge of good and

evil). (Kant, as we remember, answered precisely that

question, saying that reason was indeed a sort of punishment

since Adam’s free choice wrested him from harmony with

nature, making his life difficult, filled with anxiety and

conflict.) Maimonides, however, thinks otherwise and

resolves the apparent paradox by first agreeing with the

objector that Adam’s condition consists in having acquired

knowledge and a cognitive capacity of a sort. But

Maimonides then maintains, contra the objector (and also

contra Kant), that the knowledge in question is not fully

rational. What Adam gained (or enhanced) was instead an

inferior kind of bodily cognition that in his original

perfection, he had not needed, Maimonides proposes. For

Adam acquired in the story (what all human beings by nature

have and by situation need) a full-fledged imagination by

22

which to control the raging desires unleashed by his

impulsive act.32

Adam’s disobedience results, according to Maimonides,

in his becoming endowed with a faculty that has become

equipped to apprehend conventional knowledge and categories,

a capacity that Maimonides says he did not have and did not

need prior to this, within the story. Adam apparently had

from the beginning the capacity to have bodily desires and

to visualize images for his impulsive act presupposes those.

But he did not initially perceive, nor was he able to

construct, moral conventions. So Adam gained in the story

what would generally be designated in the Aristotelian

tradition, ‘the practical intellect’. Maimonides, however,

both here in this chapter and systematically throughout the

Guide, avoids mention of the practical intellect, instead

relegating its practical and deliberative moral functions to

31 Sara Klein-Braslavy in Maimonides’ Interpretation of the Adam Stories in Genesis: A

Study in Maimonides’ Anthropology (Jerusalem: Ruben Mass, 1987): 40, suggests

that he is intended by Maimonides as a “man of science.”32 Lawrence Berman in “Maimonides on the Fall of Man,” (in AJS Review ,

vol. 5, 1980: 1 - 15), (p. 9) points out that for Maimonides “Paradise

(gan ‘eden, pardes) is identical with theoretical speculation.”

23

the bodily faculty of the imagination. So Maimonides

downgrades moral knowledge by relegating it not to the

practical intellect as the Aristotelian tradition (and

Maimonides’ own Eight Chapters) had done, but to a bodily

faculty outside the intellect –namely, to the imagination.33

In addition, he extends the imagination (as Alfarabi had

before him) to include the capacity for political

leadership. The enhanced imagination that Adam now has in

the story, unlike the wayward antinomian primitive

imagination that took Adam initially by surprise, when

perfected, has its vital function in instituting social

accord and conventional morals, and generally in governance.

Adam, we recall, has become like Elohim, which Maimonides

interprets here to mean, like a ruler. He has gained the

33 Lawrence V. Berman, shares the view (p. 10) that Maimonides’ is

arguing that “the fall story symbolizes man’s coming under the power of

the imagination from an original idyllic state in which he was

completely devoted to truth and falsehood, not being concerned with good

and evil actions.” For an extended treatment of the claim that according

to Maimonides Adam becomes endowed with a full-fledged imagination as a

result of his disobedience, see my, “The Garden of Eden: Spinoza’s

Maimonidean Account of the Genealogy of Morals and the Origin of

Society.”

24

capacity for defining and instituting morals and moral

leadership. Adam becomes like an excellent ruler having

acquired the capacity to institute and enforce conventional

regulations that create harmony in the passions of self and

society. We might see this story as analogous to a just so

story, for example, how the tiger got its spots. It is not

that there were ever unspotted tigers but that via the story

we now know something about the nature of tigers, through a

fanciful etiological tale, that we didn’t know before.

Similarly, in the Phaedrus we know something about both the

proper ideal and also the vicissitudes of the rational, yet

flawed, nature of the human soul from Plato’s fanciful tale

of its origin in an intelligible realm whose truths it can

recall, once it falls to earth, only in fragments. Moreover

it is no doubt not accidental that Maimonides’

interpretation of Adam and Eve in II, 30 begins with Plato’s

etiological fantasy (and perhaps comic absurdity, given

Plato’s placement of it in the mouth of Aristophanes) from

the Symposium of human sexual desire in an initial androgyny

of the human species.

25

Maimonides in his interpretation of the Eden story

draws a stark contrast between theoretical reason and

practical thinking--a point about which Shlomo Pines has

written much.34 So we find that the initial Adam was not

only rational (and certainly not without intellect as beasts

are –as the learned challenger, and Kant for that matter,

claimed) --in Aristotelian terms, a rational animal—but he was

in Maimonides’ estimation also the perfect philosopher. For

Maimonides says of Adam that:

Through the intellect one distinguishes between

truth and falsehood, and that was found in [Adam]

in its perfection and integrity.35 34 “Truth and Falsehood versus Good and Evil: A Study in Jewish and

General Philosophy in Connection with the Guide of the Perplexed, I, 2,”

in Studies in Maimonides, ed. by I. Twersky, (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1991)) See my critique of Pines on this matter in Note 43 below.35Guide I, 2 (Pines: 24) Zev Harvey and Sara Klein-Braslavy also

maintain that Adam had a perfected imaginative capacity before the Fall.

But nothing in the text suggests that and much precludes it. For, first,

Adam was seduced by the body. And second, he did not do what the

perfected imagination is essentially characterized by, according to

Maimonides, --namely, he govern and institute morals. In fact, that’s

exactly what Maimonides explicitly claims he could not do till after his

punishment. So I do not think that the claim of Moses’ perfected

imagination in pre-Fall Eden is tenable.

26

So not only did Adam initially have a rational capacity, he

had a perfected intellect engaged in theoretical pursuits. It is

Adam’s acquiescence to impulse that leads him to

turn away from the intellectual joys of Edenic paradise.

Adam’s disobedience was in pursuing bodily desires rather

than intellectual ones and his punishment was the refocusing

of his attention to the bodily faculty that regulates the

passions, namely, the imagination. Maimonides says of Adam

that by “becoming endowed with the faculty of apprehending

generally accepted things, he became absorbed in judging

things to be bad or fine.”36 And Maimonides elaborates a

little on the nature and status of these moral terms and

categories:

Fine and bad … belong to things generally accepted

as known, not to those cognized by the intellect.

For one does not say: it is fine that heaven is

spherical, and it is bad that the earth is flat;

rather one says true and false with regard to

these assertions … Now man in virtue of his

intellect knows truth from falsehood … with regard to

27

what is of necessity, there is no good and evil at all.37 (my

italics)

So Adam “was punished by being deprived of intellectual

apprehension,”38 a kind of apprehension that included no

practical or moral thinking. It is only Adam’s turn to the

body—in other words, his full humanity-- that necessitates

the invention of morals (through using his newly enhanced

imaginative capacity) to limit corporeal excess and also

social conflict. Before that turn, in other words ideally,

in the intellectual contemplation of heaven and earth desire

is focused upon the joys of contemplation and neither

corporeal temptation nor social conflict have a place.

Therefore, Maimonides says of Adam in Eden, “when man was in

his most perfect and excellent state, in accordance with his

inborn disposition and possessed of intellectual cognition,

he had no faculty that was engaged in any way in the

consideration of generally accepted things and he did not

apprehend them.”39 So it is the Adam who has already

37 Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, Translated with an

Introduction and Notes by Shlomo Pines, University of Chicago Press

(Chicago and London, 1963), I, 2, Pines pp. 24 - 25

28

disobeyed the divine command, the Adam who is truly human

and lives in a real world peopled by actual flesh and blood

human beings, who is the creator of morals; but he does so

not because he has acquired reason, as the Kantian Adam has,

but rather because he has lost it –or lost its optimal ideal,

its asymptotic, state. We might say that Maimonides’

disobedient Adam stands for not only human limitations and

the human condition but also for the non-philosophic masses

in need of external controls to curb their appetites, in

contrast with the Edenic Adam who is the ideal philosopher

living in a netherworld ivory tower paradise, his

intellectual love freely turning him away from the body and

toward intellectual pursuits. The practical and perfected

imagination has, however, an important role to play but only

in a non-Edenic world, that is, in the real world of flesh

and blood and social relations. For in his fully human

state, Adam turns to the regulation of his newly aroused

passions, moderating them so that they conform to socially

beneficial ends. In all societies, because they regulate

populations of potentially disobedient Adams, Maimonides

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tells us in his chapters on prophecy and politics40, this

practical task is assigned to the imagination to implement

in the individual and maintain politically. The imagination

also figures for Maimonides in an even more noble capacity,

that of the Torah’s approximating and disseminating for a

mass society some of the theoretical scientific knowledge

that Adam’s philosophic Eden had to offer.41

Now let’s turn back to Kant. Reason supplied four new

capacities to Adam, in the Kantian version: First, freedom,

40 See especially Guide especially, II, 40.41 Mosaic Law, Maimonides maintains, gives the community governed by

justice and convention a taste of the ultimate joy of the intellectual

life. For Mosaic Law, unlike the strictly imaginative law of the non-

prophetic statesman, is divine, Maimonides says, because the prophets,

unlike mere political leaders (i.e., the founder and followers of the

‘nomos’), are those whose intellect, as well as imagination, is

operative in governance. They are thus enabled to apply the imagination

to conceptual knowledge, thereby rendering it in imaginative form

precisely geared to the understanding of the masses. In this way, a

glimpse of intellectual Paradise opens to the Law’s adherents. II, 40

(Pines: 384; Moreh vol. 2: 84b) For an excellent treatment of this

chapter of the Guide and of the prophetic versus the nomoitic

constitution, see Miriam Galston’s article, “The Purpose of the Law

According to Maimonides” in Maimonides: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by

Joseph A. Buijs.

See also Translator’s Introduction (xci - xcii).

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the power to choose for oneself a way of life; second, a

degree of control over sensual impulse, over the natural

self; third, the expectation of a future; and fourth, the

human status of alone being an end and all other creatures

and things merely means to human ends. This latter was the

real “release from the womb of nature,” in Kant’s

estimation. Adam's disobedience is interpreted as the first

act of freedom. Ethical life originates in, is initiated

by, an act of wresting and differentiating and distancing

the self as human from the natural world; this sets the

trajectory of human history as a progressive distancing of

the human from nature, internal and external, and the

progressive use of the natural for human ends. The unique

"dignity" of the human being is held to consist in this God-

like distancing and posture, which is its "freedom." (Kant,

unlike Maimonides, seems to intend the speculative

historical trajectory from Adam onwards as a conjectural

philosophy of history rather than strictly as an allegory.)

For Kant the advent of the human marks the repudiation of

the self as natural and within the natural world. It is the

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hope for complete self-control over natural impulses and

natural processes. Adam learns that he can choose his

actions and invent himself and control both himself and the

world for ends he invents. Ethics is confining oneself to

acting upon this "dignity" which asserts our human

superiority to all natural being and acting on it as our

sole motive by subduing and repudiating, at best, the

natural self and seeing all other human beings as having

equal status. (Although women and "uncivilized peoples" have

less reason for Kant they still are of equal moral status as

rational and post-natural.)

So what is the upshot? The upshot, I think, is that

Kantian reason corresponds more to Maimonides’ perfected

imagination than to Maimonides’ reason or intellect. Self-

control is for both thinkers the self- and social imposition

of the restraint of impulse. But the dignity of the human

person for Maimonides does not consist in this but in the

theoretical intellect. Moreover, it is not the common

possession of reason in all human beings that is the source

of our ethical relations but a more prudentialist, a

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physician’s, concern for a harmonious social body and a

balanced life. The Mosaic constitution institutes practical

virtue in that it is well-ordered, promoting mutual accord

and justice --i.e., the mean between excess and defect

(Guide II, 39); and it aims at theoretical virtue, a return

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to Paradise (to the extent that that is possible), in that

it promotes in individuals both wisdom and the desire for

theoretical knowledge. As Shlomo Pines points out,

Maimonides radically opposes the true to the good, casting

the turn toward the good and away from the true as the Fall

of Man.42 This is profoundly non-Kantian and very

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Aristotelian, in fact it perhaps out-Aristotles Aristotle,

so to speak.43 For in the final analysis, reason for

Maimonides is about the passionate engagement, the

intellectual love, that is worship and also the flourishing

of the human person. That is what ultimately heals the

soul, sublimating, calming, and minimizing the unruly

passions that are the cause of so much pain and conflict.

The paradigmatic example is Moses, of whom Maimonides says

that, “because of the greatness of his apprehension [of

God’s ways, the divine governance, which is God’s attributes

of action44 or physics] and his renouncing everything that

is other than God, …his intellect attained such strength

that all the gross faculties in the body ceased to function”

and because of his great joy in that which he apprehended,

he did neither eat bread nor drink water.”45 For according to

Maimonides:

The philosophers have already explained that the

bodily faculties impede in youth the attainment of

most of the moral virtues and all the more that of

pure thought, which is achieved through the

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perfection of the intelligibles that lead to

passionate love of Him, may He be exalted.46

[True] worship ought only to be engaged in after

intellectual conception has been achieved. If…

you have apprehended God and His acts in

accordance with what is required by the intellect,

you should afterwards engage in totally devoting

yourself to Him, endeavor to come closer to Him,

and strengthen the bond between you and Him—that

is, the intellect. …The Torah has made it clear

that this last worship to which we have drawn

attention …can only be engaged in after

apprehension is achieved; it says: To love the Lord

your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and will all your

soul. Now we have made it clear several times that

love is proportionate to apprehension.47

But that intellectual engagement is not, as it is for

Kant, a repudiation of nature and of the natural flourishing

of the rational animal nor is it the control of nature

toward our own ends. It is, instead, at once both the

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fulfillment of our human nature as God intended it and also

the embrace of the natural world through understanding its

underlying rational scientific basis, to the small extent we

can, as an expression of the divine, as the divine action.

So it is only through Creation for Maimonides that we

approach God, a Creation of which we are a part. Nature is

rich with that divine possibility and that dignity which we share

with all things; and while, no doubt, we have unique access to

some small aspect of the divine intent, nevertheless, the

dignity of Creation is not uniquely our own. So human beings for

Maimonides are deeply embedded within nature; we are

expressions of nature and, as such, privy to the workings of

nature. Our minds are as natural as our bodies and they are

divine in that they enable us to approach the underlying

principles of nature as synoptically as God does. Our

perfection is the perfection of the natural, of our natural

capacity for the scientific understanding of the natural

world. Moral virtue is expressed in our practical

implementation of a social organization that furthers our

natural physical and psychological or characterological well

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being, an organization which is also stable enough to be

conducive to our engaging in theoretical contemplation of

the natural. What a contrast is Maimonides’ rational human person

mentally coming to oneness with the underlying laws of nature as a whole to the

Kantian rational human freedom from nature (even and especially from any

42In “Truth and Falsehood versus Good and Evil,” Shlomo Pines argues

that Maimonides, in an unprecedented interpretation of Adam’s sin,

radically opposes the true to the good. It is this radical opposition

that Spinoza will later both adopt as the cornerstone of his ethical

theory and explain theoretically in terms of his own elaborate

psychological doctrine.

See also Lawrence V. Berman’s, “Maimonides on the Fall of Man,” in

AJS Review, vol. 5 (1980). Berman argues (8 - 9) that according to

Maimonides,

the fall of man consisted in a change of priorities,

from an interest in the things of the mind to becoming

interested in the things of the body; from being a

philosopher, a master of his passions, to becoming a

beast in human form, mastered by his passions; from

being a solitary thinker, to becoming a ruler of

cities, being informed by imagination only.

… Thus previous to the fall, Adam was not concerned

with matters relating to values but only with the

truth.

Berman goes on to suggest (Note 22, page 8) that since “imagination did

not enter in Moses’ prophecy (Guide 2:36 end and 2:45 end) … thus Adam

and Moses were identical, the difference being that Adam, before the

fall, represents the ideal for man, not living in society, while Moses

represents the ideal for man living in society.”

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human nature) and the Kantian rational free will imposed upon nature, internal

and external! What different ideals and values—interrelation

versus atomic separation and self-invention, contemplation

versus mastery, special dignity versus joyous immersion and

union; the mystic versus the man of action and technological

43 Maimonides is on firm Aristotelian ground in distinguishing sharply between the theoretical and practical intellects. So I don’t think he is

straying as far from or radicalizing Aristotle as much as Pines seems

to. For Aristotle repeatedly tells the reader that “practical wisdom is

not scientific knowledge” (Nicomachean Ethics (henceforth NE) VI, 8

(1142a). Each is the virtue of a different part of the soul (NE VI, 11

(1143b)). Many great scientists, Aristotle names Thales and Anaxagoras,

were in fact moral cretins for they were ignorant of human goods.

Though they knew remarkable, admirable, difficult, and even divine

truths, he says, these were ultimately useless to them (NE VI, 7

(1141b)). Aristotle distinguishes here between the theoretical and the

practical in content as well as in mental operations. For the

theoretical is that which is beyond direct human concern, he points out,

insofar as man is not the best thing in the world. Practical wisdom, in

contrast, is relative to human concerns and ends (NE VI, 7 (1141a).

Aristotle does however acknowledge that theoretical thinking is a human

virtue, an activity engaged in for its own sake and hence one which

results in human fulfillment and joy.(NE VI, 12 (1144a)). Nevertheless

Aristotle is ambivalent about exactly how human theoretical intellection

really is. For in NE Book X in his paean to the theoretical life as

alone providing complete and supreme happiness to humanity, he also

suggests that it reaches beyond the human. Contemplation is the

activity par excellence not of human beings but instead of the gods. It

makes us immortal and is far more like the divine life than the normal

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triumph. The contrast drawn here with the medieval Judaeo-

Arabic Maimonides can help us become aware of the pervasive

Kantianism of our modern ethical assumptions and offer some

resources for a needed alternative.

human concerns that engage our practical thinking and challenge our

moral virtues. The latter Aristotle, like Maimonides in the Guide, here

associates with the body in contrast with the mind. So Maimonides is on

firmer Aristotelian ground than we initially expected and Pines

proposed. Lo and behold, we have discovered in N.E. X the immortal,

contemplative, divine-like Adam before his disobedience and punishment!

He is living a life akin to the divine, with no need to focus on the

body or on practical thinking devoted to normal human social virtues.

Aristotle even says of his gods, who are engaged exclusively in

contemplation, exactly what Maimonides says of Adam, namely, that they

have no need to concern themselves with matters of justice or social

policy or moral deliberation. Thus for Aristotle, too, divine beings had no need for the

practical intellect and that’s what distinguished them from the rest of us! So Adam, as we

might have expected, is not of this world –not initially, anyway. That

transition will be marked by Adam’s acquisition of a full-fledged body,

a full-fledged humanity, where he can no longer live by contemplation

alone. In falling to earth, so to speak, Adam must engage his practical

intellect –that is to say the perfected imagination—in the pursuit of

normal human individual and social virtues. As in Aristotle, he must

acquire practical wisdom embedded in a body, which for Maimonides is the

imagination.44 See, e.g., 1, 51, Pines, p. 12445 III, 51, Pines, p. 62046 III, 51, Pines p. 627

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47 III, 51, Pines, pp. 620- 21

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