Introducing the concept of devequt or conjunction in his essay, Irvy may have well hit upon the most significant term that links Maimonidean rationalism to the theosophic speculation of the latter kabbalistic tradition. Comparisons of this sort are not altogether new. Scholem, for his part in solidifying many categorical divisions in the study of Kabbalah, was able to see his way through to accepting some commonality between the Guide’s usage of conjunction and the kabbalists desire for union with God. He offers a view in which:

Symbols are born, in the last resort, of the memory of ecstatic moments of an inexpressible content. There is something wrenching and shattering about it. The kabbalists of Gerona attempted to contain the symbol within contemplation without permitting it to become pure allegory. This developing interest in the symbolic character of religious life led to the first great literary wave of mystical commentaries. The Bible, the aggadoth of the Talmud, the prescriptions of the Torah, and the prayers become mystical symbols of deeply hidden divine realities, whose expression in itself is inaccessible and denied to us. Seen in this way, Maimonides’ Guide can at best only lead to the threshold of mysticism, but no further. (11)

Wolfson amplifies this most basic insight of Scholem and then carries it further in pointing to a common ground wherein we acknowledge that “…philosophers and kabbalists shared the experience of devequt, the conjunction of the soul to immaterial forms.” (12) There is no shortage of instances where the Guide bears witness to this assessment. Take for example some of the passages quoted by Ivry in his essay:

He [Maimonides] prefers to speak of the developed stage of the intellect simply as the “intellect in act” [verses “acquired intellect” of Farabi and Avicenna—my note], having in Guide I 68 elaborated on the complete merging of subject and object in the dynamic act of cognition: “For the intellect in actu is nothing but that which has been intellectually cognized…the act (of each intellect) is identical with its essence.” (13)

Or, in continuation:

In I 72 of the Guide, Maimonides does refer by name to the acquired intellect, saying that it “is not a faculty in the body but is truly separate from the organic body and overflows towards it,” [Guide p.193 Pines.] This reference to emanation would seem to indicate the Maimonides has identified the acquired intellect with the Agent Intellect. This is not surprising, in that the knowledge possessed by the acquired intellect, which is also and always an intellect in act, has been acquired ultimately from the Agent Intellect.  It is that supernal intelligence that informs all sublunar objects and renders them intelligible, enabling us to comprehend them. Out knowledge of the essential nature of the world is thus knowledge of the Agent Intellect. As we have seen, the act of cognition is regarded as a joining of subject and object, and thus the acquired, active intellect may be said to be with the Agent Intellect, and to be it. That is, the entire acquired, active intellect of a person is also (part of) the Agent Intellect, thought the entire Agent Intellect is not identical with a person’s intellect, normally. (14)

Moreover, Ivry describes how: “…to think the Agent Intellect directly, to apprehend it without any intermediary physical instantiations of the universal truth that is thought. The term “conjunction,” ittişāl, is traditionally reserved for this allegedly exclusive relation to the Agent Intellect.” (15) And finally:

Conjunction is thus treated here as the culmination of an extraordinary intellectual process, although it is actually, if less dramatically, at work in every true cognition. Maimonides expresses the quotidian usage of conjunction in the first chapter of the Guide, when he writes that it is “because of the Divine intellect [for which read Agent Intellect] conjoined with man” that he is said to be in the image of and likeness of God. (16)

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

Thus, when Ivry outlines the interrelated notions of “medieval epistemology” which “refer to medieval notions of the soul, its nature, actions and destiny,”  (17) we need to be suspicious that Maimonides is hiding more behind the “traditional epistemological scheme.” (18)

Of note is the lack of philosophic justification that Ivry claims for Maimonides position on the immortality of the soul. I would argue in Maimonides defense, that this apparent theological move underscores his relatively non-explicit epistemological agenda. Would it not be fair to speculate that the function of an immortal soul would serve as the medieval substitute for the more modern “transcendental subject?”

As Adorno maintains that “in epistemology, ‘subject’ is usually understood to mean the transcendental subject,” acting as the “prolongation [that] is mind’s identity-consciousness, which repressively makes its Other like itself.” (19) As ‘prolongation’—even till the point of eternity—the subject is the secularized substitute for the soul sustained in a kind of a-temporality where thought thinks from beyond the vicissitudes of time, capturing and claiming as its own a truth put up for adoption by the very model from which it is forged.

Once again we might extend a super-commentary/translation and ask after more recent analysis of this problem of conjunction. Would its description not consist in the persistence of the other (here the ob-ject) within the same (sub-ject)? As we see with respect to questions of the “conjunction” between soul and God, subject and object, the imagination as the apprentice of the senses steals across a similar invisible bridge that unsettles the separate designations of subject and object. We enter what Wolfson has titled “(Dis) embodied eros: via contemplativa and unio mystic.” (20)

Might this “suprarational knowledge” in Faur’s locution, imply the “relation of no relation” to borrow a Levinasian idiom?  Having traveled through the rational signifies the exhaustion of the relational, the ratio, between two distinct entities—the subject and object—whose reification went unnoticed for too long. ‘Conjunction as union’ dissolves the subject and object into each other disarming the remaining fail-safe that guarded their identity of difference and–no longer able to relate from the standpoint of being supra-rational, that is, having related all too well–they are over-related in all their oozing abundance. Disfigured as a concept due to its dangerous proximity to the Divine, the human psyche screens the drama of theosophic revelation where, hot on the heels of Adorno, the distinction is “both real and semblance.”

11  While there is a reference in Scholem’s essay “Devekut, or Communion with God” p.205 (whole essay is pp.203-227) in The Messianic Idea in Judaism another important instance where the discussion meets up with the issue of Maimonides and mysticism is in Origins of the Kabbalah p.408 quoted above.

12 “Wings” p.3.

13 Ivry. Pp.11-12 quoting Pines translation of the Guide p.165.

14 Ivry. P.12.

15 Ibid. p.13.

16 Ibid. p.13 Quoting the Guide I 1 [p.23 Pines].

17 Ibid. p.3.

18 Ibid. p.3.

19 Adorno. “On Subject and Object” in Critical Models. P. 247.

20 Wolfson. “Wings” p.13.

Bibliography

1. Adorno, Theodor W., Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York:  Columbia 2005.
2. Blumenthal, David R. “Maimonides; Philosophic Mysticism” in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, vol.3. edited by David R. Blumenthal. Atlanta: Scholars Press 1988.
3. The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, edited by Kenneth Seeskin. Cambridge: Cambridge 2005.
4. Davidson, Herbert A., Moses Maimonides: The man and His Works. Oxford: Oxford 2005.
5. Faur, José. Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed. Syracuse, Syracuse 1998.
6. Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell 1968.
7. Moreh Nevukhim, 2 vols., trans. Michael Schwartz. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press 2002.
8. The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1963.
9. Scholem, Gershom. Origins of the Kabbalah. Translated by Allan Arkush. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.
10. Scholem, Gershom. The Messianic Idea in Judaism. New York: Schocken 1995.
11. Wolfson, Elliot R., “Beneath the Wings of the Great Eagle: Maimonides and the Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah” in Moses Maimonides—His Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts, edited by Gorge K. Hasselhoff and Otfried Fraisse pp.209-237. Wurzburg: Ergon, 2004.
12. Wolfson, Elliot R., Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination. New York: Fordham 2005.

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