Jewish Philosophy, Ethics, and the New Brain Sciences

16Jewish Philosophy, Ethics, and the New Brain Sciences

Heidi M. Ravven  Introduction

I reflect here on my trajectory from the exegetical and

historical study of Jewish philosophical texts to my current

project of the mining of those texts for insights into

contemporary philosophical problems, especially in moral

psychology.  My particular interest is with how the Judaeo-

Arabic and Arabic medieval philosophical tradition in moral

psychology, radicalized by Maimonides and built upon by

Spinoza, offers ways of rethinking moral agency in keeping

with discoveries in the brain sciences.  So my focus is on

how Jewish philosophy can be a fecund resource to

philosophers trying to think about the human moral subject

in truly innovative ways.  Our philosophical sources, in

contrast with those that emerged from the Latin West which

still inform and dominate standard philosophical and general

cultural notions of human nature, have largely been treated

in historical contexts but not yet mined for their potential

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contributions to contemporary philosophical issues.  They

are a treasure trove of innovative thinking if we just bring

them into contact with cutting edge philosophical grappling,

and also with the sciences.

Whence and Wherefore

In 1968, at age sixteen, I fell in love –with Israel.

It was hardly a surprise. I come from a family of ardent

Zionists—mostly secular, leftwing, socialist, Shomer

Hatzair-niks. Intellectual Litvaks on both sides. My

father’s family, the Ravven-Rabin-Robins, originally from

Meretz, Lithuania but now in both Israel and the US, are in

psychology and philosophy. It’s more or less the family

profession. My daughter, Simha E. Ravven, M.D., has

continued the tradition as a psychiatrist. The Ravven

family is also highly learned in Jewish texts, as was my

mother’s family, the Morrisons (Movshovitz), from Troki,

Lithuania. My father’s first cousin, Albert Israel Rabin, a

Shomer Hatzair leader in Lithuania, reluctantly came to the

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States at age 18, became another brother in the Ravven

household, and within a couple of decades was one of the

founders of academic clinical psychology in America. Cousin

Al Rabin spent years in Israel doing research and became

well known for his psychological studies of kibbutz

children. His subjects were largely children on his brother

Yankel’s kibbutz, Mizra, where Yankel, with a twinkle in his

eye, had introduced the pork sausage business. Yankel and a

Christian Arab from Nazareth privately owned the pigs when

the government no longer allowed pig grazing on Keren

Hakayemet land. In 1986, upon ‘Uncle Yankel’s’ death, the

family inherited the pigs.

My father, Robert M. Ravven, M.D. Ph.D., a philosophy

major at Harvard and a student and T. A. of W. V. Quine,

became a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst. Following in

cousin/brother Al Rabin’s footsteps, my father took my

mother and me to Israel for the first time when I was seven

in 1959 –the kids on Kibbutz Mizra thought I was ‘Heidi bat

he-harim’ and had come directly from the Swiss Alps. We

spent a year in Jerusalem in 1962-63. My father taught and

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practiced at Hadassah Hospital and had an affiliation with

the Jerusalem Psychoanalytic Institute. I spent fifth grade

living and going to school in Rehavia. My parents’ circle,

both in Israel and Boston, consisted largely of Israeli

academics who were studying or on sabbatical at Harvard,

MIT, BU, Brandeis, and the rest. All were ardent Zionists,

founding faculty in various fields at Israel’s nascent

universities, mostly Central European born, and several were

prominent in the academic study of Judaism. There was no

end to my admiration for these Israeli founders, for their

idealism, for their courage, for the brilliance of their

minds, and for the humanity of their social and political

vision. At sixteen, I went with a NFTY group to Israel for

the summer and fell in love for myself and not just as a

member of the corporate Ravven family. So I am exactly who

you would expect to come out of this background: a Zionist

secularist, a philosopher, a moral psychologist. A

Spinozist. Sometimes one strand of this identity has been

dominant and sometimes another. I came into my own as an

undergraduate and then graduate student at Brandeis

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University where I studied with Professor Alexander Altmann,

and then in the Philosophy Department. At Brandeis, I was

‘discovered’. Professor Altmann once remarked to me, ‘you

are Brandeis’.

Jewish Philosophy

  Jewish philosophy can mean three things: 1.) the

historical study of the writings of thinkers who self-

consciously engaged in the literary traditions and

conversations of Jewish philosophy; 2.) the philosophical

study of Judaism—its meaning, values, approaches, rituals,

social and political structures, genres of rational

discourse, and the like; and 3.) the mining of past Jewish

philosophical engagements to help address present questions

of current philosophical interest and debate. The first

enterprise is largely, if not strictly, descriptive rather

than normative. The second tends toward engaging in a

search for a normative Judaism, both in the past (that

search can be descriptive) and in the present (that is a

present and engaged normative theological enterprise). The

final model is of a normative philosophical search yet one

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whose content, unlike the second, is not restricted to

Judaism as its object but instead ranges widely, focusing on

any current philosophical questions to which the Jewish

philosophical tradition might have something to contribute.

The first model describes the history of the Jewish

encounter and engagement with Greek classical philosophy in

its various historical incarnations --Philonic, Arabic,

Kantian, Hegelian, Existentialist, and the like. Its

questions are as wide-ranging as the philosophic and

scientific subjects of its various Jewish and non-Jewish

partners in dialogue. The second engages the encounter with

the classical and subsequent philosophical tradition with

questions about our Jewish self-definition in mind,

historically and/or normatively. It is philosophy as

handmaid, subordinate, to religion. And the third, harks

back to the original wide-ranging encounters to engage in as

broad an enterprise in search of universal insights and

wisdom –to be contributed to the larger philosophical

world-- from its own particular philosophical tradition and

texts.

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My interests and writings have for the most part fit

into the first and the third models with a couple of brief

forays into the second, the articulation of and speculation

about a distinctive Jewishness or a normative

characterization of Judaism. Initially my interests were

largely historical and explicatory –what did Maimonides

actually say and what positions did he embrace in The Guide

and Spinoza in The Ethics, The Theological-Political Treatise, and to a

lesser extent in their other writings. In what sense can

Spinoza be said to be a Maimonidean? What did he adopt and

adapt and what did he eschew? How does what Spinoza

embraced from Maimonides fit into his other influences and

doctrines? I then turned to ask deeper questions: What do

their positions really amount to philosophically? Are any

their questions, arguments, and doctrines still alive, and

if so which ones? Can we extract still vital approaches,

distinctions, and insights from the dated language and

religious and other metaphors, or is that to do violence to

the texts and betray their meanings and intentions? Do

these texts still speak to us philosophically or only as

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historians and as Jews? Can we put these philosophical

writings in conversation with philosophical concerns today

or must they be quarantined and mothballed in an antiquarian

or Jewish corner? I learned from my teacher, Marvin Fox,

not only to be infinitely careful to understand what a text

is saying but also to ask, Is it true.

As a philosopher, and not only or principally a

historian of philosophy, and specifically as a Jewish

philosopher, I search for greater understanding not only of

texts but also of the questions that the texts raise. As

Amos Oz has recently proposed, we Jews are joined together

not principally by a bloodline but by a ‘textline’. Through

the immersion and creative, generative engagement in Jewish

philosophical textual analysis I want to come to a better

understanding of the world and the human mind –and not just

of the Jewish minds that engaged in philosophy so long ago.

It would do an injustice to Maimonides and to Spinoza and to

the Jewish ‘textline’ itself not to care about what they

cared about but to care only about understanding their

thinking in their contexts. They cared passionately about

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coming to a greater understanding of nature and the

universe, human society, and how to pursue a fulfilling life

of broad significance and spiritual embrace. To study them

is to honor their search by continuing it, and not just to

worship their answers as if human knowledge ended with them,

or worse, that their grappling with these questions is of

none but historical interest or a source of ethnocentric

pride.

Doing Philosophy in a Spinozist Key

My direction took a decisive turn toward doing

contemporary philosophy in a Spinozist key as a result of

two fortuitous events. The first, just after the turn of the

century, resulted from a chance occurrence. I went on

sabbatical leave in the spring of 2001 and had the leisure

to read more widely and for the general enhancement of my

knowledge of what was going on in the world of science,

albeit as a layperson. One of the precariously stacked

piles of books in my bedroom yielded up the neuroscientist,

Antonio Damasio’s, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the

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Making of Consciousness. I started reading, and behold! It

sounded just like empirical evidence confirming Spinoza’s

account of the emotions. Uh oh, I thought. I have now

reached the point where everything sounds like Spinoza. I

put it down for six months and when I returned to it, it

still seemed to capture Spinoza’s theory. So at that point

I looked up Damasio on Amazon dot com and, lo and behold, a

yet unpublished book was listed as his next: Looking for

Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. I knew I was on to

something. I decided to write up the precise aspects of

Spinoza’s account that Damasio’s and other research into the

brain mechanisms of the emotions had confirmed and also to

rethink and re-describe Spinoza’s theory of moral agency in

terms of the mechanisms discovered by the new affective

neuroscience. That led to a collaboration with several

neuroscientists, including discussions with Antonio Damasio.

The neuroscientists also showed a growing interest in

Spinoza, not only by Damasio but also by Jaak Panksepp,

author of Affective Neuroscience, a textbook defining this new

field and foremost researcher into the evolutionary

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continuity of mammalian emotions. Several people working

in Neuropsychoanalysis were also intrigued by what Spinoza

might have to offer in terms of understanding the

philosophical implications of what the new brain sciences

were exploring and exposing. The trajectory of my work took

a new direction and sphere of publication.

The second fortuitous event that set me decisively on

the path of contributing Jewish philosophical insights and

approaches to contemporary discussions was a call, out of

the blue, from the Ford Foundation. My work on Spinoza had

sparked their interest and the upshot was that I was handed

$500,000 over a five-year period to write a book that would

introduce Spinozist and other Jewish philosophical

approaches into the contemporary discourse in moral

philosophy, debates that had largely reached, in their view,

an impasse. I took that to mean revising the account of

moral agency (why and when people are ethical, why and when

they are not, and how to get them to be more ethical)

implicit in philosophical discussions of ethics. In my view

that was where the problem lay. I wanted to explore whether

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a Spinozist account of moral agency-- one backed up,

revitalized, and modified by contemporary affective

neuroscience—could be introduce to enliven, refocus, and

broaden the philosophical conversation. Nine years later, I

have completed the book, The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of

Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will (The New Press,

2013).

Jewish Medieval Rationalism Meets the New Brain Sciences and

Philosophical Ethics via Spinozai

How can we rethink both moral agency and moral

responsibility within a framework that acknowledges that

human beings are fully biological organisms, that they are

within the world and not beyond it or above it, and that the

mind, particularly consciousness, is real and is as much a

product of nature and embedded within causal networks and

systems as is the body? These were the central questions I

wrestled with in The Self Beyond Itself. At the dawn of modernity

Spinoza anticipated a number of important discoveries in the

i The remainder of this essay draws on my book, The Self Beyond Itself: An

Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will

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recent brain sciences and, stemming from his embodied

account of the mind, --an account profoundly influenced by

Maimonides and the Jewish medieval embodied Aristotelian

naturalism of the Arabic philosophical tradition of falsafa--

he turned to rethink moral agency from a proto-biological

point of view.

Spinoza’s principles—of the non-reductive identity of

mind and body; of the affectivity of all thinking; of the

mind as the very activity of understanding and desiring

(rather than a Cartesian bounded thing that thinks and has

ideas) expressive of one’s engagements with the environment

as self-enhancing or self-diminishing; of the unconscious

character of human motivation; his rejection of free will;

his prescient insight into the biological urge to organic

self-organization (mental as well as physical) within

environments local and ultimately as large as the universe,

to name some central theses—provide a fruitful and new

starting point for making sense and synthesizing a lot of

the new thinking about how the mind produces action. They

go a long way to explaining moral action as well, while

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rethinking the human person as situated within environments,

and expressive of those environments, internal and external,

social-cultural and also natural.

Spinoza’s account of moral agency, which he called

‘ethics’, represents, perhaps, the best starting point for

trying to integrate the evidence emerging from the new brain

sciences and other relevant disciplines to develop a

composite view of the basic moral brain, of the optimal

route to its development, and of the implications of such a

view for how social, legal, political, and other

institutions and practices might to be redesigned. It also

contributes a corrective to the dominant philosophical

paradigm, a paradigm that retains many Cartesian

presuppositions. In addition, it is a crucial part of the

story –one that has not yet been adequately brought to light

and to general attention—that the standard account of moral

agency, in particular its Cartesian presuppositions and also

its Kantian appropriation, originates in and remains

expressive of a Christian theological story and

anthropology, albeit in implicit and veiled ways.

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Spinoza’s embodied account of the human mind --in

contrast with Descartes' famous mind-body dualism—expresses

not only a viable and welcome alternative but also comes out

of a Judaeo-Arabic philosophic milieu quite different from

the Latin Christian. I have argued at length that Latin

Christian presuppositions about human nature have dominated

mainstream philosophical discourse in moral psychology to

such an extent that their cultural and theological

particularist conception of the human has become normalized

and universalized as ‘philosophical’, and their theological

agenda wiped from view and forgotten.

I propose that one agenda of future Jewish philosophy

be an ongoing investigation and identification of (largely

secularized and hence veiled) Christian theological

presuppositions that still haunt standard philosophical

discussions, the shaping of the questions, and the setting

of the parameters of debate. A philosophical point of view

from a medieval rationalist philosophical tradition emergent

from classical Greece, yet not run through Latin

Christendom, can be an enormously powerful corrective and

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source of contemporary creativity and insight. There is a

pressing need, in my view, to bring falsafa into contemporary

philosophic conversations. To do so will require the

translation of many of its medieval terms and metaphors into

contemporary idioms and to modernize its worldview. Let

Spinoza be our guide. The recent revival of Aristotle in

ethics and especially in new accounts of moral agency that

try to capture the findings of contemporary brain science

(for example, Casebeer, 2005) would be well-served by

routing that embodied Aristotelianism via Alexandria,

Baghdad, and Iberia rather than trying to reinvent the

wheel.

Augustine’s Invention of the Western Notion of Human Nature

Our standard Western philosophical and widespread cultural

anthropology is provincially that of the Latin West. That

the assumptions we hold about how and why we are moral,

which set the terms of the philosophical debate, are

provincial ones of the Latin West rather than universal

conditions of agency, can be exposed in their appeal to a

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deep, yet implicit and particularist theological narrative

that has gone underground as a deep cultural inheritance.

These presuppositions too often appear to philosophers as

universally true beliefs about moral agency and human nature

because of their cultural ubiquity in the West and their

implicit unconscious character. Yet the appeal and the

warrant for them, I argue, is to a Christian myth about how

the human person fits into the universe and into the natural

world. That Christian myth, while it has been explicitly

stricken from philosophical discussion, nevertheless still

frames the concept of human nature dominant in standard

philosophy.

The explicit claim and picture of miraculous divine

agency has dropped out of the story, yet the mythic

portrayal of the human person as developed in the story has

remained fundamentally unchanged. That account of human

nature is captured in the notion of ‘freedom will’. I have

argued at length that that account that grants to the human

person magical powers beyond nature and nurture. Rather

than a universally valid feature of human moral nature, free

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will, I expose, is a fundamentally theological claim and

relies for its plausibility upon an implicit and specific

cultural religious narrative. The free will account of moral

agency and moral responsibility is a very specific Latin

Christian theological invention whose history can be traced

from its crystallization to its present near dominance in

philosophy and generally in the West. Rather than a mere

cultural commonplace, free will owes part of its ubiquity to

its Catholic institutional doctrinal enforcement.

Philosophical discourse on moral agency hardened in the

thirteenth century due to a Church ban on the denial of free

will. Perhaps, paradoxically, the revival movements of both

the Reformation and Counter Reformation exhibited further

hardening of the doctrine in the return to and embrace of

various Augustinianisms and neo-Augustinians across the

range of camps and opinions.

That the notion of free will captures and is shorthand

for a particular Christological cosmology and salvation

history is first evident in its origins: for the Church

Father Augustine “practically invented the concept” of free

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will (Wetzel, 2000), comments James Wetzel, holder of the

Augustinian Chair in the Thought of St. Augustine in the

Philosophy Department at Villanova University, a university

founded in 1842 by the Order of St. Augustine. In

developing and articulating a clear notion of free will in

the 4th century C.E., Augustine was explicitly engaging in

rendering the Christian salvation myth into the terms and

language of a quasi-philosophical, quasi-rational, quasi-

scientific theory that would replace the Greek classical

naturalist account of the universe and of the place of the

human person within nature.

There was a moment of invention, of creating a clear

and new conception of human nature from disparate strands.

This is what the fourth-fifth century theologian Augustine

accomplished. The Augustinian conception of human nature

took such hold on the imagination that subsequent wrestling

with human nature in the Christian West, in both theology

and philosophy, has largely been a footnote to Augustine.

Augustine redefined what it means to be human, what it means

to be moral, and what the human role in the cosmos is.

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Peter Brown, the great scholar of Late Antiquity and of

Augustine, describes the overall transformation initiated

and instituted by Augustine:

[Augustine] allowed the Platonic sense of the majesty of the cosmos to grow pale. Lost in the narrow and ever fascinating labyrinth ofhis preoccupation with the human will … Augustine turned his back on the mundus, on themagical beauty associated with the material universe in later Platonism. … Augustine would never look up at the stars and gaze at the world around him with the shudder of religious awe that fell upon Plotinus when he exclaimed … ‘All the place is holy’ as Oedipus had exclaimed at Colonus, and as Jacob had doneat Bethel. … Augustine pointedly refused to share this enthusiasm. … Something was lost, in Western Christendom, by this trenchant and seemingly commonsensical judgement.

Brown even laments that, “if Augustine was the ‘first modern

man’, then it is a ‘modernity’ bought at a heavy price.”

For that price was the “dislodg[ing of] the self, somewhat

abruptly and without regard to the consequences, from the

embrace of a God-filled universe.”ii ’ What got left behind

was the classical Greek reverence for nature, the sense of

the magnificence of a natural world in which the human

person was at home and via which the glow of the divine ii Augustine of Hippo, pp. 502-512

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could be glimpsed and some sparks of it captured through

intellectual understanding.

At the end of his biography of Augustine–a biography

that has now become a classic—Brown proposes that Augustine

produced a profound shift away from the culture of the

ancient world: “Seen against the wider background of the

classical philosophical tradition, Augustine’s magnificent

preoccupation with the problem of the human person and his

fascination with the working of the will represented a

decisive change in emphasis.” Brown further points out that

Augustine has been called, “‘the inventor of our modern

notion of will’.” For Augustine deflected the locus of

human striving for meaning and purpose away from the

philosophic and scientific search for the human place in

nature and the cosmos and toward a concern for the

individual will. His achievement was a “shift from cosmos

to will,” decisively, “ a turn[ing] away from the cosmos,”

Brown says. The notion of free will and the intensity of

focus upon it were, in a sense, shorthand for what Brown

calls, “the mighty displacement of an entire religious

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sensibility.” Moreover, “this displacement of attention

from the cosmos to the saving work of God, through Christ,

was the most hotly contested of [Augustine’s] many

doctrines,” (Brown, 2000, 502-512) points out. He concludes

that Augustine’s “intervention proved decisive for the

emergence of a distinctive notion of the individual in

Western culture.” Augustine’s account of the human person

reduced all internal mental operations – thoughts, emotions,

feelings, judgments, learning—to acts of will. That was the

basis of his new theory of moral psychology. So it was

Augustine who set in motion the trajectory of the freedom of

the will as defining the human person. It was Augustine who

set free will as the mark of the human, of what it means to

be moral, and what the human role in the cosmos is. It was

Augustine who identified free will as the basis for the

possibility of taking moral responsibility. We are

responsible, he argued, only for what we ‘freely’ do or

will. This new theory amounted to nothing less than a shift

in worldview—in the conception of the human person and of

the universe that human beings inhabit and, hence, in the

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conception of moral agency— putting the freedom of the will

at the center of cosmos and of the human person and of their

relation. The spiritual was redefined as the voluntary and

God’s will was interpreted as the cosmic principle to which

the human free will was obligated to come into conformity

through obedience. Nature, as a consequence, was demoted as

the locus of the divine-human relation and of the source of

human self-understanding in the cosmos. It is this

worldview that we in the West have inherited. All these

presuppositions are still resonant in the notion of free

will. The concept captures an entire particular Augustinian

theological anthropology and cosmology.

The Jewish concept of free choice is not the same as

this notion of free will, although there has been a tendency

to slur their boundaries. In the latter the issue is how an

All Powerful God can allow for some human agency independent

of direct divine control. The standard account of free

will, instead, revolves around the issue of the independence

of human action from natural biology, nurture, and current

situation. The latter discussion revolves around the

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question, Are human beings originators of their actions (at

least to a substantial degree) or are they determined by the

conjunction of myriad factors that make up the local and

distal causal context, inner and outer? The Jewish concern

also concerns Christian and Muslims: it is the question of

how divine purpose and direction can allow for the human, of

how divine and human power are to be reconciled. In the

free will problem, however, the matter at stake is the role

of natural causal processes –Do natural causal explanation

and laws apply to human action and more generally to the

human mind or only to material processes and to animals,

plants, and minerals but not to human action? For the mind

to be ‘free’, in the sense of free will entails the claim

that it is not fundamentally determined by all the

biological and social cultural and situational contextual

factors that apply. Those factors are influences but not

determinative, for human beings have a freedom to act beyond

them, beyond the natural and nurtural construction of the

human person, beyond prediction and in principle beyond full

rational explanation. That is the claim of free will. It is

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a denaturalizing, disembodying, and de-contextualizing of

human action. (Ravven, 2013: chapter 4)

I will now introduce a contrast between Maimonides’

moral psychology and Kant’s in their respective

interpretations of the Garden of Eden that will dramatically

highlight the Latin Christian Augustinian presuppositions

framing the Kantian conception of free will still dominant

today with a Maimonidean naturalism.

Maimonidian versus Kantian Philosophical Anthropology

The contrast between the interpretations of the Garden

of Eden of Maimonides and Kant could not be more stark nor

more telling. Nature for Maimonides represents the opening

of the path to a system of rational explanation that can

unlock the divine secrets of the universe and fulfill the

human soul in the only way possible, through intellectual

engagement. Following the tracks of nature is to follow the

divine code, the only route to God’s mind available to

human beings, the only path to loving communion with the

divine, and to the rapture of eternity. The ideal human

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posture is the loving embrace of nature and the discovery of

the God-filled universe as one’s true home. It is a

contemplative and empathic stance, a non-invasive,

conceptual embrace. For Kant, in contrast, nature was

confined to body; and reason, a uniquely human capacity, was

the proof that human beings were above nature and could

impose their will upon the inchoateness of matter, in self

and world.

For Kant, Adam’s sin results in his acquiring reason,

which enables him to free himself from nature. For reason

provides Adam with four new capacities: first, freedom, the

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

of control over sensual impulse, over the natural bodily

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

uniquely human status of being an end whereas all other

creatures and things in nature were merely means to human

ends. Kant described reason as the human “release from the

womb of nature.” Adam's disobedience is the first act of

‘freedom’ from nature.

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For Kant, ethical life originates in and is initiated

by an act of wresting and differentiating the human from the

natural world. The escape from Eden (if we can call it that)

sets the trajectory of history as a progressive distancing

of the human from nature, internal and external, and the

progressive harnessing of nature for human ends. The unique

"dignity" of the human species is held to consist in just

this God-like distancing and controlling posture, ‘power

over’ all: it is that power, the power of the will, over body

and world that is designated as "freedom." For Kant the

advent of the human marks the repudiation of the human

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

hope of completely willed mastery 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 the human

superiority to all natural being. Acting according to one’s

human ‘dignity’ should be humanity’s sole motive. It means

subduing the natural self and seeing all other human beings

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as having equal status above nature. (Although women and

"uncivilized peoples" have less reason Kant says, they still

are of equal moral status as rational and above the

natural.)

We can discern the Augustinian underpinnings of the

assimilation of reason to will in the Kantian moral vision.

Nevertheless we note that the overt Augustinian theology of

direct divine intervention has been eliminated from the

Kantian picture. A theology that distributed free will

between human person and a personal God, thereby preserving

some human limit and humility, was eliminated in a

secularized modernity. The human person has now absorbed

much of the divine side of free will –a position adumbrated

in Descartes’ philosophy. Kantian obedience is self-

legislation, not submission to divine legislation. Yet

individual free will it remains.iii

For Maimonides, in contrast with Kant, intellectual

engagement could never amount to an overriding of nature.

Human flourishing is the natural end of a rational animal, and

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does not consist in the subduing of nature, thought of as

external to the human, toward human ends. Instead, knowing

is both the fulfillment of human nature and also the loving

embrace of the natural world through understanding its

underlying rational scientific basis, to the extent

possible, as an expression of the divine, as the divine

necessity, or in Maimonides’ naturalizing theological

language, as the divine ‘action’. So it is through Creation

for Maimonides that we approach God, a Creation of which we,

body and mind, are a part. Nature is ripe with that divine

iii We also discover throughout the Kantian critical philosophy the

notion of reason as will. The human universal subjectivity is an

imposition upon, and the human shaping of, nature (for example, in the

contribution of the human intersubjective mental categories of causality

and time as the prism through which the world is grasped) are acts of

will rather than reason thought of as the discovery of what’s already

there. (We see a nod to Descartes’ voluntarist account of cognition in

Kant’s theory here, too, of course.) The ubiquity of reason functioning

as will in this way is, for Kant, a presupposition of our experiencing

anything at all; human will thus replaces the divine will as constitutive

of (the explanation of) Nature in this secularized account. Kant picks

up on the Cartesian legacy of created eternal truths but attributes them

to the human knower: these are ideas of nature that God wills and could

have created differently. God knows the world because he knows his own

will –and so, too, human being know the world because we see it through

the categories we impose upon it.

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possibility; and while, no doubt, we have unique access to

some small region of the divine universe, nevertheless, the

dignity of the divine creation is not uniquely our own.

Hence human beings for Maimonides are deeply embedded

within nature as special expressions of nature and, as such,

potentially privy to (some of) the workings of nature via

the theoretical path of discovery and loving understanding.

The human mind is as natural as the body, and theoretical

reason enables it to approach the underlying principles of

nature synoptically. Standard moral virtues are not a human

perfection in the Maimonidean conception but a sorry

necessity of the difficult existential conditions of human

life. Nevertheless, the social organizations and

conventional virtues that further human practical well-being

also ought to support all those who are capable of pursuing

the true human natural divine goal: the pursuit of

theoretical knowledge.

It was this beatific vision of the philosopher-

scientist fully engaged in the search for knowledge—with its

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accompanying intense joy and expansive love toward the

divine expression discoverable in the natural universe—that

inspired not only Moses Maimonides but also Baruch Spinoza.

He thought through the Maimonidean vision to try to explain

in secular, quasi-scientific terms the moral psychology at

its heart. Spinoza set himself to making a modern,

rational, and philosophically compelling case for

Maimonides’ understanding of the intellectual aim of human

life and the transformation of moral motivation that it

offered (Ravven, 2013 and Ravven, 2013a).

This example of the contrast between Kant’s and

Maimonides’ notions of the human person in God’s universe

exposes a Maimonidean naturalism in philosophic outlook that

is more compatible with science, and particularly the brain

sciences, than the standard legacy of the Augustinian. It

also helps us to identify the supernaturalism at the heart

of the seemingly rational notion of free will: free will

turns on the claim that we originate our actions, and that

moral responsibility depends on some measure of origination.

Origination, however, (whether it is held to entail a choice

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among alternatives or more narrowly a kind of self-starting)

entails the claim that each of us has a significant degree

of independence (or ‘freedom’) from history, context,

culture, group, present situation, and even biology to

enable us, uniquely as a species, to act beyond our nature,

history, and context. It is the old Augustinian claim of

the spiritual nature of the human person amounting to will,

a will that has its origins and character beyond nature in a

magical realm where the laws of nature (and nurture) need

not apply. Will in God and human intervenes in nature and

history from above and beyond them. This is theology not

science and its introduction into philosophy creates a

philosophical tradition beholden to religious dogma and

subject to internal doctrinal limits. Nowhere more than in

philosophical ethics, in the underlying moral psychology,

has this been true and remains the case.

The claim of free will is false not because it is

foreign to us –after all, the classical Greek culture was as

foreign to us as the Latin Christian. Nor is it false

because its origins are in Christian theology. (That would

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be to commit the genetic fallacy.) Free will is false

because it is rationally implausible (as Spinoza remarked,

free will presupposes a magical, separate ‘kingdom within

(the) kingdom’ of nature) and, furthermore, the

neurosciences and other brain sciences are exposing it to be

empirically false. It only seems to be plausible because of

our Western cultural familiarity with it. We Jewish

philosophers are educated and live in a Christian culture

and have assimilated the ways that that culture and its

history pervade our discipline, philosophy and even Jewish

philosophy, especially post-Kantian Jewish philosophy. Yet

our own rigorous and far less ideologically constrained and

theologically beholden Jewish medieval philosophical

tradition provides us with insights and alternative views

that can be the starting points for enormously creative

contributions to many narrowly conceived standard

contemporary philosophical discussions. Creative Jewish

philosophical engagement need not be either moribund or

narrowly self-referential. We are sitting on an

intellectual goldmine. We need to set our sights on

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discovering what we can glean from the great philosophic

tradition that we have inherited, one that built upon the

best of Greek classical philosophy largely without the need

to compromise and then rationalize the compromise.

References

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_____. St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi Ad Literam), translated andannotated by John Hammond Taylor, S.J., Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, edited by Johannes Quasten, Walter J. Burghardt, and Thomas Comerford Lawler, No. 42 (New York, NY and Ramsey, NJ: Newman Press, 1982)

_____. The City of God against the Pagans, edited and translated by R. W. Dyson,(Cambridge, New York Port Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, 1998, Fifth printing, 2005)

Brown, Peter. 2000. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography: A New Edition with an Epilogue. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Casebeer, William. 2005. Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition. Bradford Books.

Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. First edition. Mariner Books.

_____. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Mariner Books.

Kent, Bonnie. 1995. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century, (Washingon, DC: The Catholic University of America Press.

Maimonides, Moses. 1968. Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

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Menn, Stephen. 1998. Augustine and Descartes. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paolo, Delhi: Cambridge University Press.

Morgenbesser, Sidney and James Walsh (Eds.) 1962. Free Will. Englewood

Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Timothy O’Connor, “Free Will,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

Panksepp, Jaak. 2004. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Series in Affective Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ravven, Heidi M. 2001. “The Garden of Eden: Spinoza’s Maimonidean Account of the Genealogyof Morals and the Origin of Society.” In Philosophy & Theology 13 (1) [PAGES]; special issue on Spinoza’s Biblical Hermeneutics edited by Heidi M. Ravven and Lee C Rice.

_____. 2003. “Spinoza’s Anticipation of Contemporary Affective Neuroscience.” Consciousness and Emotion: an interdisciplinary Science and PhilosophyJournal, ed. by Ralph Ellis and Natika Newton, 4 (2): pp. 257-290(34)

_____. 2003. Review of Antonio Damasio: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, andthe Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003. Neuro-Psychoanalysis 5 (2): pp. 218-231

_____. 2013. The Self beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will. New York: The New Press.

_____. 2013a. “Maimonides’ Non-Kantian Moral Psychology: Maimonides and Kant on the Garden of Eden and the Genealogyof Morals.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy (volume 20, number 2, 2012): pp. 199–216 (18)

Wetzel, James. 2000. “Snares of Truth: Augustine on Free Will and Predestination.’ In Augustine and His Critics ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 12-141. London and New York: Routledge.

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