Repository | Book | Chapter

The chapter discusses the striking rule of modern intellectual Judaism: The more Kantian a Jewish philosopher is orientated, the more interest in the thinking of Maimonides he usually displays. This rule will be observed from Salomon Maimon's groundbreaking use of Kantian methodology in interpreting Maimonides right up to Hermann Cohen's controversial neo-Kantian reading of the Guide. The chapter follows the repeated claims about a certain consensus between Kantian thought and Maimonides' Guide specifically. Beginning with some theories that isolated Maimonidean doctrines may have found, via one channel or another, their way into Kantian thinking, the liberal Jewish intellectuals soon proposed much more: an inherent congruency between major parts of Kantian philosophy and the teachings of the Guide. And while those claims sometimes reached an unjustified scale, informed by the motivation of the authors to support Maimonides' theology with Kant's authority, there always were other and more realistic ideas as to how Maimonides' and Critical Philosophy could be intrinsically connected. Prominent among the realistic suggestions is the similarity between the concept of God for Kant and Maimonides, since both thinkers seem to use the notion of philosophical analogies to describe an otherwise unknowable God. Interestingly, among the Jewish Kantians, the quest for parallels between Maimonides and Kant never attained philosophical depths; they either assume a general implicitness of those parallels, or their motivation to find parallels stems from other than true philosophical reasons in the first place. At any rate, they hardly take the time to invest serious effort into so much as finding truly appropriate quotes in Kant for what they want to show Maimonides has anticipated of Critical Philosophy – although such passages were readily available in Kant's works. Contrary to that, the neo-Kantians (especially Hermann Cohen and Benzion Kellermann) were forced to keep the apparent similarity between Maimonides and Kant on a more general level – for they had often surmounted Kant exactly in those fields of thought where comparing Critical Philosophy with Maimonides seemed to be most rewarding: the Ding-an-sich and the concept of God, which Cohen remarkably transformed from a mere postulate of practical reason into the highest ethical principle.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4035-8_8

Full citation: