Salomon Maimon

Salomon Maimon (* between 1751 and 1754 , probably 1753 in Schukau Barok , Poland-Lithuania , as Schlomo ben Josua Haiman ; † November 22, 1800 in Nieder-Siegersdorf , Kingdom of Prussia ) was a philosopher and Jewish enlightener .

Life

Childhood and youth

Salomon Maimon, born in a village near the Belarusian town of Mir , then Poland-Lithuania , grew up as the second son of a rabbi. His father and grandfather owned an estate leased to the Radziwiłł princes . His older brother Joseph was born five years before him. The family did not live in poverty, but was more often exposed to resentment and coercion from the village lords. Maimon's access to education is initially through lessons from his father, who let him read Genesis at the age of six ; later he forbade him to read anything other than the Talmud . However, he secretly read other titles from his father's library, including the writing Zemach David (Scion of David) by the Prague Rabbi David Gans . According to another work by this author, he tinkered a "Sphaera armillaris" from braided rods , which he had to hide from his father.

At the age of seven he attended a Hebrew school in Mir, whose draconian teaching and disciplining methods (knocking out eyes and tearing ears) as well as technical incompetence and lack of equipment aroused the father's suspicion. Although the latter brought and won a lawsuit against the educational institution, the family was soon forced to leave the village in the middle of winter, losing an entire annual harvest, and move to the town of Mogil'no . So they got into a financial crisis because they were forced to build a house there that was not below the standard of the tenants there.

In Ivenec Maimon attended a Talmud school, where he noticed the local rabbi and was taught personally. At the age of eleven, he was already considered a Talmudic expert. As a result, several families tried to marry him off to their daughters, and were not afraid of intrigue or legal proceedings. There was even an attempt at kidnapping. In 1764 he finally married - at the age of eleven - Sarah Rissia, the daughter of the owner of the local inn. His mother died that same year. At the age of 14, Salomon became the father of his first son, David.

As a young family man

Early family life was marked by many arguments with the mother-in-law. Maimon, however, as a tutor, had to raise the family cost of a not very affluent family with many children and was forced to spend the night in their domicile during the week. Despite these adverse circumstances, Maimon had the knowledge of a full rabbi, reinforced by profound knowledge of history, astronomy and mathematics. He knew only Yiddish and Hebrew , but he learned German by himself by deciphering the Latin letters of the pagination of some Hebrew books and comparing words on a few loose pages from a German book with Yiddish.

He borrowed Kabbalistic books from his neighbor and tried in vain to use them to make himself invisible. At the same time he had the Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides read and could therefore conclude that it is not the Kabbalistic creation model to a temporal, but a causal chain of events to be interpreted. In later years he emphasized that the main idea of Kabbalah that everything arises from God through hidden channels is to say that everything arises from a single substance. He understood the Kabbalah as an expanded Spinozism and identified the ten Sephiroth with the ten categories of Aristotle .

Maimon urged curiosity so much that he walked 150 miles to borrow books in German from a rabbi of German origin. There he received, among other things, a book on optics, which he studied intensively.

At about the same time he was introduced to the society of the " New Hasids " and so came to the court of Dow Bär von Mesritsch . However, he was soon deeply disappointed by the magic tricks performed there and finally even advocated the ban of the Gaon of Vilna over the Hasidim. Maimon mistakenly held a Joel Baal Schem (probably Joel ben Uri Heilprin ) instead of Baal Schem Tov for the founder of neo-Hasidism.

First trip to Berlin

Driven by his thirst for knowledge, Maimon decided to travel to Germany in 1776. His first destination was Königsberg , where he was mocked for his appearance and his broken German, but was quickly able to gain respect for his knowledge of Hebrew. Fellow students recommended a trip to Berlin.

Due to unfavorable weather conditions, the trip took five weeks instead of two. Maimon traveled through Stettin and Frankfurt on the Oder . Starved and exhausted, he reached Berlin in the autumn of 1776.

There he first had to settle in a guarded reception center on Rosenthaler Platz , as Berlin did not allow the entry of penniless Jews. There he revealed his admiration to a Polish rabbi for the work Leader of the Undecided by Maimonides (after which he later renamed himself). The content of this conversation came to the knowledge of the authorities, and Maimon was expelled from Berlin on suspicion of a tendency to heresy.

In the reception center, Maimon had made the acquaintance of professional beggar Jews and became one of them. He traveled through Germany in this status for half a year until he finally arrived in Posen in autumn 1777 . There he met old friends who gave him a position as head of house. He spent two more or less happy years in Poznan, until he fell out with the local community and again wanted to move.

In 1780 he reached Berlin for the second time, this time in a stagecoach, and stayed in the already familiar reception hall. This time the officers found the Maimonides pamphlet Millot Hagaion (Manual of Logic) in his luggage , which again led him to the situation of possible deportation. Fortunately, however, there were guarantors for him who averted this fate.

In Berlin he came across a book by the philosopher Christian Wolff and wrote a criticism that he sent directly to Moses Mendelssohn as a follower of Wolff. The latter showed interest, invited him to salons and wrote several letters of recommendation for him.

In Berlin he discovered his fondness for literature and poetry and led an exuberant life. A study of medicine failed, but he got a proper diploma as a pharmacist, which he should never make use of. His uncertain life planning, his unsteady way of life and various conflicts finally prompted Mendelssohn to suggest that he leave Berlin. With a number of positive letters of recommendation he traveled to Holland.

Walks through Holland and Germany

In Amsterdam he again struggled with communication problems and got into arguments with Kabbalah followers. After a fruitless attempt to take his own life, he traveled to Hamburg .

There he tried to convert to Christianity, but the Lutheran cleric he addressed rejected the very unusually formulated request and described Maimon as too philosophical to be a Christian. From 1783 to 1785 he visited the Christianeum in Altona with fellow students who were many years younger, with the aim of perfecting his German. He excelled in all subjects except Greek.

When an agent of his wife found him in Hamburg, whom he had left in 1777, and now tried to compel him to divorce, he left for Berlin again in 1786.

This time it was easier for him to find a job because of his better language skills and the help of his friends. He was given a project in which he was supposed to translate important works into Hebrew for the purpose of enlightening the East European Jews. For this purpose he had to stay in Dessau and deliver the results in Berlin. However, when he did not deliver results, relations with his acquaintances deteriorated again.

So he finally moved to Breslau. When he arrived there, he found that his letters of recommendation were no longer effective, as his Berlin friends had meanwhile sent negative reports in advance. Only the German-Jewish poet Ephraim Kuh was still on his side. This introduced him to Christian Garve , who helped him to find a position as tutor. Another attempt to study medicine on the advice of friends failed. He translated morning hours or lectures on the existence of God from Moses Mendelssohn into Hebrew and wrote the first treatise on Newtonian physics in Hebrew, entitled Taalumot chochma (Secrets of Wisdom).

As his pupils grew, there was no longer any need for home tuition and Maimon found few new pupils. In addition, his wife found him in Wroclaw and asked for a divorce, which Maimon took reluctantly. After the divorce, he returned to Berlin again in 1786.

Since Mendelssohn had since passed away, he found little support. Lazarus Bendavid finally gave him a patron who enabled him to deal with the few years before published Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant to deal with.

Maimon and Kant

The skills that he had acquired in exegesis of the Talmud helped him to cope with the difficult matter. He himself described his hermeneutical procedure in such a way that he first read through a chapter of a work superficially, in order then to put himself in the position of the author and to consider how he would solve the problem himself. The autodidact, who had never attended university, not only succeeded in thinking his way into the Critique of Pure Reason , but also tracked down weaknesses in it, which he shared with in his first work, attempt on transcendental philosophy, written in German (published 1789) a cover letter from Marcus Herz to Kant personally.

Herz confirmed to Maimon that he himself was not in a position to judge such a profound criticism, although he was one of the students in Königsberg that Kant particularly valued. Since Kant was very busy and Maimon's writing was relatively extensive, it was a long time before Maimon received an answer. However, this turned out to be correspondingly positive, as Kant valued his criticism very much. In a letter to Herz dated May 26, 1789, he wrote “that not only did none of my opponents understand me and the main question so well, but that only a few would like to have as much acumen as Mr. Maymon. ”Maimon's criticism remained the only criticism from an outsider that Kant accepted of his work.

Kant also wrote a letter of praise to Maimon himself, in which he confessed that his investigation "in fact reveals no common talent for profound sciences." This letter from Kant determined Maimon's future. He found a publisher for his work and scientific journals accepted his articles for publication. Kant, who otherwise had little correspondence, wrote one of his longest letters with his letter to Maimon. However, there was no further exchange with Maimon. In 1790 the article was printed unchanged, without taking into account Kant's counter-arguments by Maimon.

Afterwards he wrote another critical essay in which he compared Kant with Francis Bacon . He also sent this to Kant, but received no answer, although he expressly asked for a few lines. Kant, on the other hand, wrote in a letter to Karl Leonhard Reinhold that his age did not allow him to take foreign ideas into account and that he did not understand what Maimon was aiming for with his attempts to improve critical philosophy and that he suspected that he was like many Jews, I just wanted to put themselves in the foreground at the expense of others.

The autodidact Maimon's criticism of Kant, which hits the core of the conceptual content, deserves special appreciation above all because all professional reviewers (e.g. Christian Garve ) found the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to be largely incomprehensible, which was what prompted Kant to publish a completely revised version in 1787, which should make misunderstandings more difficult.

The last period of life

Despite his intellectual abilities, Salomon Maimon never managed to make a decent living. He was also inclined to alcohol and negotiated conversations with him for a drink in Berlin pubs. At night he staggered home drunk, declaiming metaphysical problems. His appearance was always poor and he didn't care about wigs or face powder. He often wrote his writings in pubs, and manuscripts were not infrequently lost. Nevertheless, his autobiography, inspired and edited by Karl Philipp Moritz , appeared in 1792/93 , which was a great success. Even Goethe thought about inviting Maimon to Weimar.

In the same year two other important works by Maimon appeared: The Inquiry into Transcendental Philosophy and a Commentary on the Leader of the Undecided in Hebrew (More Nevuchim).

In 1793 he joined the Society of Friends, which had been founded the previous year, and was elected to the board as an associate member for one year .

In the years 1793/94 appeared Ueber die Progressen der Philosophie caused by the price question of the royal. Akademie zu Berlin for the year 1792: What has metaphysics done for progress since Leibniz and Wolf? and the attempt at a new logic or theory of thought as well as commentaries on Aristotle and Bacon and an annotated translation of a book on Newtonian physics. The unauthorized publication of his correspondence with Reinhold caused displeasure .

From 1795 Maimon was supported by his permanent patron Count Heinrich Wilhelm Adolf von Kalckreuth and spent the last years of his life on his estate in Nieder-Siegersdorf , although he would have preferred to stay in Berlin.

Maimon's last monographic work was published in 1797: Critical Investigations into the Human Spirit or the Greater Power of Knowledge and Will . He continued to dream of returning to Berlin and writing a treatise that would finally explain what the absolute was.

Memorial stone for Maimon in Belarus

Maimon died at the age of 46 or 47, either from complications from alcohol consumption or from a lung disease. After his death on November 22nd, 1800 he was buried as a heretic outside the cemetery of the Jewish community in Glogau without a tombstone . Only at the instigation of Count Kalckreuth was a tombstone finally erected. Since the Jewish cemetery in Glogau was completely destroyed during the Holocaust , it can be assumed that the tombstone that can be seen there today is a replica.

In Berlin his death caused no sensation except for an obituary by Lazarus Bendavid . It was not until ten years after his death that Sabbattia Joseph Wolff wrote the book Maimoniana. Or rhapsodies on the characteristics of Salomon Maimon .

Major works

All of Maimon's important German-language works (and a few others) can be found in the following edition:

Salomon Maimon: Collected Works . 7 volumes, edited by Valerio Verra, Olms, Hildesheim (various editions); Abbreviated with GW , the volume is indicated with Roman numerals, last 3rd reprint 2003 (first edition 1965), ISBN 3-487-00882-3 .

The most important works are (quoted with the bibliographical information of the first edition):

All of Maimon's writings are published by Florian Ehrensperger and Ives Radrizzani in a complete edition by Frommann-Holzboog Verlag (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt). The first volume of a total of ten volumes should first appear in 2010, but has since been announced on Amazon for 2015 after postponements to March 2012, June 2013, and later on Amazon . ^[outdated]

literature

Samuel Atlas: From Critical to Speculative Idealism: The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1965.
Lazarus Bendavid: About Solomon Maimon. in the national journal for science, art and trade in the Prussian states: together with a correspondence sheet. 1801, Т. 1, pp. 88-104.
Samuel Hugo Bergmann : The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon. From the Hebrew by Noah J. Jacobs. The Magnes Press, Jerusalem 1967 (in English).
Jan Bransen: The Antinomy of Thought: Maimonian Skepticism and the Relation between Thoughts and Objects. Dordrecht 1991.
Meir Buzaglo: Solomon Maimon. Monism, Skepticism, And Mathematics. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh 2002.
Florian Ehrensperger: life story. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 483-487.
Amos Elon : The pity of it all. A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Picador, A metropolitanan book. Henry Holt, NY 2002.
Achim Engstler : Investigations into the idealism of Salomon Maimons. Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1990.
Aza Harel: Maimon, Solomon. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , pp. 709-711 ( digitized version ).
Nicolai Hartmann : The Philosophy of German Idealism. de Gruyter, Berlin 1960, p. 19ff.
Eckhard Klapp: The causality in Salomon Maimon. Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1968.
David Lachterman: Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition and the Infinite Intellect: Reflections on Maimon and Maimonides. in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1992 Т. 30, pp. 497-522
Yitzhak Y. Melamed: Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism. in Journal of the History of Philosophy . - 2004 Т. 42, # 1, pp. 67-96, doi: 10.1353 / hph.2004.0010
Konrad Pfaff : Salomon Maimon. Job the Enlightenment. Mosaic stones for his portrait . Hildesheim; Zurich; New York: Olms. 1995.
Carl von Prantl : Maimon, Salomon . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1884, p. 107 f.
Regina Maria Seitz: Secret texts: Criticism of the Enlightenment in Mendelssohn, Behr, Maimon and Kuh , UMI, Ann Arbor, MI 1999, DNB 956055400 (Dissertation University of Virginia 1997, 252 pages).
Joseph Wälzholz: The anti-social educator. Salomon Maimon's "Life Story". Wallstein, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8353-1893-9 (dissertation University of Jena June 23, 2015, 119 pages, under the title: Attack on the "enlightened wanters", Salomon Maimon's life story , reviewer: Lambert Wiesing , Stefan Matuschek, Conrad Wiedemann full text online PDF, free of charge, 119 pages, 1.4 MB).
Sabbattia Joseph Wolff : Maimoniana. Or rhapsodies on the characteristics of Salomon Maimon. Berlin 1813.
A monument to Salomon Maimon. in Kalonymos volume 13, 2010, no. 4, p. 16 (with ill.).
Carola L. Gottzmann / Petra Hörner: Lexicon of the German-language literature of the Baltic States and St. Petersburg . 3 volumes; Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-11-019338-1 . Volume 2, pp. 878-881.

Web links

Wikisource: Salomon Maimon - Sources and full texts

Commons : Salomon Maimon - collection of images, videos and audio files

Salomon Maimon Society V.
Literature by and about Salomon Maimon in the catalog of the German National Library
Peter Thielke and Yitzhak Melamed: Entry in Edward N. Zalta (eds.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Andrew Kelley: Entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Biography, primary texts, extensive bibliography on the pages of the Salomon-Maimon-Gesellschaft e. V.
Works as digital copies from the Bielefeld University Library
Biography Salomon Maimon offered by EPOCHE NAPOLEON
Spinozism, Acosmism and Hasidism: A Closed Circle "at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with Prof. Dr. Yitzhak Melamed and Dr. José María Sánchez de León

Individual evidence

↑ For a discussion of Maimon's year of birth see Samuel Atlas
↑ The Great Herder , 1955
↑ a representation of the Kantian correspondence can be found in: Arsenij Gulyga: Immanuel Kant. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-518-45568-0
↑ S. a. Kuno Fischer, History of Modern Philosophy
↑ S. a. Immanuel Kant. Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–1799 (Midway Reprint), Arnulf Zweig (Ed.), Univ. of Chicago Press, quote: "For the past three years or so, age has effected my thinking - not that I have suffered any dramatic change in the mechanics of health, or even a great decline in my mental powers, as I strive to continue my reflections in accordance with my plan. It is rather that I feel an inexplicable difficulty when I try to project myself onto other people's ideas, so that I seem unable to grasp anyone else's system and to form a mature judgment of it… This is the reason why I can turn out essays of my own, but, for example, as regards the 'improvement' of the critical philosophy by Maimon (Jews always like to do that sort of thing, to gain an air of importance for themselves at someone else's expense), I have never really understood what he is after and must leave the reproof to others. "
↑ online at Seforim online (PDF; 15.9 MB)
↑ Marcus Brann : The Silesian Jewry before and after the edict of March 11, 1812. In: Annual report of the Jewish-theological seminar Fraenkel'scher Foundation for the year 1912, Breslau 1913; see. Franz D. Lucas / Margret Heitmann: City of Faith. History and culture of the Jews in Glogau. Hildesheim u. a .: Olms, 1992, 283.
↑ It is shown that old stones on Gut Niedersdorf are not gravestones, but the remains of a memorial for him that was in the park until the beginning of the 20th century. A recovery from an old photo is intended. A short biography in the article

personal data
SURNAME	Maimon, Solomon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Ben-Joshua, Solomon; BenJosua, Solomon; Maimon, Shelomoh; Maimon, Solomon; Maimon, Solomon; Solomon ben Joshua; Shelomoh ben Yehoshua; Solomon ben Joshua; Joshua, Solomon ben; Yehoshua, Shelomoh ben; Joshua, Solomon ben; Majmon, Salomon; Maymôn, Selomo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Philosopher and Jewish enlightener
DATE OF BIRTH	between 1751 and 1754
PLACE OF BIRTH	Schukau Barok , Poland-Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH	November 22, 1800
Place of death	Nieder-Siegersdorf , Duchy of Glogau , Kingdom of Prussia , Holy Roman Empire