Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

The psychology of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed engages some of the most subtle spiritual experiences ranging from ordinary processes of cognition all the way up to the overlap of the Divine and the human in a prophetic state. While name brand mystical literature has often succeeded in calling attention to the ambiguities of the human soul possessed with intellect and the Divine (agencies included), this occult relationship pushes us past the Delphic oracles’ telos of self-knowledge as the end to wisdom towards the more profound sense of knowing beyond the self in knowing the self.

At some mysterious point the rush inward turns outward or rather that which is most radically inward escapes the inward/outward distinction. From knowing myself, as the perpetual student of my own soul, I may unfold my own finitude and drift into infinity. Although difficult to distinguish from solipsism and narcissism, the venturing beyond into the realities of God and world derives from the journey to the center of one’s self. At that center one may find, surprisingly, that it is empty of self or self-recognition and is the full surrogate of both Divine and worldly others.

Here we work to uncover the place of “conjunction.” Here we struggle with the epistemological and psychological definitions of subject and object. Here we will call upon the casting director to find suitable roles for the body and the world whose characters will have to simultaneously serve as the staging for the drama of the intellect.

Underling Alfred Ivry’s essay on “Maimonides’ Psychology” are a multitude of the issues of modernity and antiquity. One might even suspect that the style of postmodernity to conflate the two together, although absent in his presentation, may be insightful for illuminating the angular momentum of the piece.

As a scholar Ivry is primarily concerned with the underground tunnels and subways that connect the texts of medieval philosophy together. (1) Buried but not lost in the past are the inter-textual affinities that tie Maimonides to a host of his processors: Judaic, Islamic and Greek. (2) And while Maimonides’ text in and of itself suffers at times from reading it back beyond itself into the influence of others, at no time does the movement of Ivry’s analysis move forward into future philosophic thinking that engages these issues outside of their historical and geographic proximity.

What we have learned from every thinker after Maimonides, I would contend, equally informs an anachronistic reading of this and other issues at play in the Guide. (3) What if we were to reverse the direction of the analysis and reread the texts from the perspectives of future participants in the same philosophical discussion. By this I mean to exclude the latter day scholarship on Maimonides as opposed to the philosophic enterprise in pursuit of the similar problematics. Not to suggest in any way that the craft of historical reconstruction of this, and other literary contexts, is not a valid and necessary critical tool in the arsenal of academic pursuits but rather to bring into relief some of the limits of this approach.

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

While I am fully cognizant that anachronistic comparison risks collapsing all of history into an undifferentiated mass imperiling the concepts of chrono-logy, progress, novelty and transcendence, it is nonetheless an investment with substantial payoffs. For those for whom all of philosophy, in a survey of Western civilization, amounts to nothing greater than a commentary on Plato and Aristotle, we must wonder whether we have cheated ourselves of originality due to unfair taxation collected and offered up to the anxiety of influences.

Spiraling forward, might we not find roots in the future as if we could dare to dream that all thinking and systems of thought were somehow entangled beyond their linear history and context. Methods aside, the inner content to be unveiled revolves around what Adorno calls the “resistance of subject and object to the act of defining,” that leaves us with “the separation of subject and object [that] is both real and semblance.” Towards this end we must begin.

¹ When it comes to making an argument for Maimonides the “philosopher” we quickly discover just how tenuous our preconceived notions are as to the type of philosopher he is. In sum, he neither fully embraces nor fully critiques’s Aristotelian and Neoplatonic paradigms. (Shlomo Pines claims “philosophic agnosticism” and Josef Stern “skepticism” best describe him.) Ivry’s view maintains a balance or even a golden mean, that refuses to cast Maimonides as either a new incarnation of “the Muslim falasifa who he admired” or as a “combinatorial optimization of the views of his predecessors.” [p.2 “Maimonides’ Psychology]. In my view, this represents sensitivity to repetition and difference—that is: an acknowledgement of the originality of Maimonides as a thinker that will always exceed attempts to exhaust his claims to originality by doling out each of his respect contributions to senior pre-patented players of past philosophic projects. At the same time, the appropriate royalties are paid out to the multitude of acknowledged influences.

² Consider, for instance the impact of Jungian analysis and how it might augment any philological approach. Expanding if not demolishing traditional views of causality, Jung has painted a picture where “influences” are arguably both less and more certain than ever before. If we are to take seriously the presence of concealed sources of influence in the unconscious, or even the collective unconscious, then any given thinker would seem to never be ‘out-sourced’ enough. Consider the following extensive quote from Jung’s Man and His Symbols on the subject of “cryptomnesia” [pp. 23-24]:

There are many reasons why we forget things that we have noticed or experienced; and there are just as many ways in which they may be recalled to mind. An interesting example is that of cryptomnesia, or “concealed recollection.” An author may be writing steadily to a preconceived plan. Working out an argument or developing the line of a story, when he suddenly runs off at a tangent. Perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to him, or a different image, or a whole new sub-plot. If you ask him what prompted the digression, he will not be able to tell you. He may not even notice the change, though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown to him before. Yet it can sometimes be shown convincingly that what he has written bears striking similarity to another author—a work that he believes he has never seen.

I myself found a fascinating example of this in Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a ship’s log for the year 1686. By sheer chance I had read this seaman’s yarn in a book published about 1835 (half a century before Nietzsche wrote); and when I found the similar passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was struck by its peculiar style, which was different from Nietzsche’s usual language. I was convinced that Nietzsche must also have seen the old book, though he made no reference to it. I wrote to his sister, who was still alive, and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old. I think, from the context, it is inconceivable that Nietzsche had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story. I believe that fifty years later it has unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind.

Applied to Maimonides, it would seem that resemblances between his work and others could and should exceed the textual and historical evidence of direct influences. Pushed still further, might we not find some of his influences in the future—where he is fathered by his own grand-child?

³ See Elliot R. Wolfson’s Language, Eros, Being in the Prologue entitled “Timeswerve/Hermeneutic Reversibility” [pp.xv-xxxi] for a sustained treatment of the issue of “anachronism.”

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/maimonides-theosophic-psychology-part-2/

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