Q&A: Shlomo Maimon
Shlomo Maimon
Question
Hello, Rabbi. I read your book Truth and Unstable Truth and saw that there you mentioned the prophetic voice of Rabbi HaNazir and Maimonides regarding looking into the ideas, but it seems to me that the basis for this way of thinking is something along the lines of Shlomo Maimon’s idealism.
Maimon argued, in response to Kant, that in order to ground science one must assume that the rational laws are derived from the productive intellect, which is the active part of consciousness that is not known to our receptive consciousness. With a formulation like this I can understand what “looking into the ideas” means, since they exist within us. But I saw here, when I typed in the question, that you do not subscribe to idealism. So what, then, grounds this “looking into the ideas”?
Answer
Someone who holds by idealism (if you mean solipsism) is not talking about what I’m talking about. Looking inward is no great feat, and that needs no grounding. I also don’t think Maimon was a solipsist. I argue that we have an ideational way of contemplating the reality outside us. That has no basis, just as the ability to see has no basis. We simply have it.
Discussion on Answer
In Two Carts I addressed the two possibilities: contemplation inward, in which case one must add the assumption that there is a correspondence to the laws prevailing outside, or else assume ideational contemplation outward. It makes no difference.
This is not about solipsism, since such an approach holds that other subjects have no inner life and only I do. What Maimon replies to Kant is that if you want to ground science and you recognize the rational lawfulness of the world, then you can assume a productive intellect (at least at the level of an idea) that creates the rules of reality through its rational laws, and then the thing-in-itself is the ability to align our cognition with the active unconscious part of consciousness that creates reality according to its rules.