The Intellect According to Maimonides and R. Nachman of Breslov
Maimonides on the intellect
Maimonides taught that the highest form of service of God is to know with certainty, via rational proofs, all that is knowable of the divine.(Guide III:51.) People who believe in and practice the Torah merely because of their acceptance of tradition are further away from God. The intellect in itself is what binds man to God. This doctrine is based on ideas developed by the Arabic expositors of Aristotle. Firstly that there is one Intellect that brings out from potential to actuality the minds of human beings and also provides the forms for all objects in this world. They named this the active intellect and it is closely identified with God. They also posited the unity of the intellect, the thinking subject and the object of thought. (I: 68) Namely, that when one understands a piece of intellect he is in essence becoming one with that intellect, which is entity unto itself. Based on this doctrine we can say that when one thinks of God he is becoming united with Him. This does not however include all types of thinking. The Rambam explains that only a person who arrived to the knowledge of God through rational cognition is considered as knowing God. Someone whose idea of God came to him through the faculty of the imagination is not knowing God rather he knows a fictitious invention of his own heart. (III: 51.)
Although the Rambam is adamant about the rationalistic path it would a mistake to say that the ultimate religious goal is dry logical speculation about God. As David Blumethal pointed out, many passages in the Guide reveal that the rational perception of the Divine is not the end of the road. After one arrived at the truth then he must meditate on the idea and hold it in his mind. As the Rambam writes, “This kind of worship ought to be engaged in after intellectual conception has been achieved...This love is to be so intense that the awareness of God in the mind and the joy in the heart do not ever cease, even when that person is involved in discussions with other people. Furthermore, the person who practices this type of communion for many years will gradually become so overcome with love and pleasure that his soul will leave his body just as it happened to Moses Aaron and Miriam.
Blumenthal names this communion Philosophic Mysticism. He also cites passages from the Guide that show that at this point the mind moves beyond intellectual categories. For example, “Apprehension of him consists in the inability to attain the ultimate apprehension of Him... ‘Silence is praise to You’(Ps. 65:2)...Accordingly, silence is preferable - and limiting oneself to [the modes of] apprehension of the intellects - just as the perfect ones have enjoined and said, ‘Commune with with your own heart upon your bed and be still’(Ps.4:5.)” (I:50) Meaning that there is a stage of inner silence and stillness that is more true than that apprehended with cognitive activity.
The mind is what connects people with the Active Intellect, therefore the more one is thinking about divinity the stronger the influence of the Active Intellect and the more he will be protected from the accidents of this world. The Rambam even goes so far as to state that nothing bad can ever befall somebody while his mind is bound to the divine. Any time that the scripture tells of a prophet was harmed in some way, it must be that this prophet’s mind momentarily forgot about God causing the Intellect’s protection to leave him and hence he became susceptible to harm. This doctrine demonstrates how seriously Maimonides took the act of thinking. Thinking is not merely a lonely activity of the brain, it is a act with metaphysical effects. The mind, when its potential becomes realized, binds with the Intellect which consequently protects the thinker.
Acquiring this intellectual, (or supra-intellectual according to Blumenthal,) knowledge of God is the goal of all religious life. All the mitzvot are meant to prepare and enable the person to attain unity with the intellect, and thus be able to survive death. According Maimonides, and in line with Aristotelian thinking, the only part of the person that can possibly survive after death is the intellect, more specifically the ‘acquired intellect’. This is achieved through the communion with the intellects and with God by way of knowing them, and since they are eternal the intellectual part of the soul that joined with them lives on too.
This doctrine has been accepted by later Jewish thinkers like Gersonides, but there is one thinker who explicitly rejected it, that is R. Hasdai Crescas. Crescas argued that the reward in the after life cannot be only for the strictly intellectual part of the personality. The intellect can not feel pleasure it can only understand. This is particularly true if this human intellect loses all of its individual identity and become incorporated into the universal intellect, leaving no person to experience the bliss of immortality. Moreover, says Crescas, immortality is not the exclusive lot of the philosophers rather it is the reward of those who serve God with love even if they have not arrived at the abstract philosophical subtleties.
In summation, according to Maimonides achieving intellect is central in religious life. It is; a) a way of serving and communing with God, b) the cause for Divine providence, c) the way to gain immortality of the soul.
The common understanding of the Rambam was that he was teaching a dry intellectualist path to God and bliss. However there were those who understood his teachings more mystically. The Rambam’s own descendants espoused a spiritual devotional path while not veering from the Rambam’s way. The kabbalist R. Abraham Abulafia developed his own mystical path whereby one used a variety of new meditative techniques to reach communion and revelation, but his theoretical basis for what these techniques achieve follows Maimonidean philosophy. These techniques are all ways to cleave to the active intellect. Some of the early kabbalists in Spain too claimed to be consistent with the Ramabam’s philosophy. R. Asher ben David, of the Provencal school of R. Isaac the Blind, writes that the ten Sephirot of the kabbalists and the ten Intellects of the philosophers are one and the same.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov on the intellect
One person who prima facie would be a highly unlikely candidate for being a follower of Maimonides is R. Nachman of Breslov. In his talks to his disciples he explicitly denounces the Rambam and other rationalistic Jewish thinkers. He was quoted as mocking Rambam’s proposed reasons for Mitzvot. He told his Chassidim to stay away from the Guide and from the the philosophic parts of Mishneh Torah. He said, “ I can tell on a person’s face if he had studied the Guide or not, because if he did his face would have changed for the worse.” Yet we have evidence in his writings that he accepted and taught some of the these intellectualist doctrines of the Rambam. It is these seeming contradictions that I would attempt to analyze. The term Sechel (mind-intellect) is to be found all over R. Nachman’s magnum opus, Likutei Moharan. Most of those references to the mind are positive; advice on how to cultivate and grasp intellect. For example in the begining of his book he writes of the need to see the intellect in every thing.” One of the identifying features of R. Nachman’s writings is that there is a constant equation of concepts one to the other; a is an aspect of b and b is an aspect of c and so on. The Sechel is equated to Moses, to the Messiah and to the revelation of the Tora of the World to Come. R. Nachman used the term Sechel with the full awareness of its meaning in medieval Jewish philosophy. Namely that it describes a metaphysical entity not just an aspect of the human organism. In one discourse he describes the world in terms of Medieval cosmology , “...The movement of the Spheres is caused by the Intellects, who are the angels. Every sphere has its own Intellect, that is angel, that controls it.... All these Intellects receive from one General Intellect that is the soul that leads them all.”
As we will further demonstrate, R. Nachman taught a metaphysics in which the cognitive mind is very central; merely having religious feelings is not enough. The mind is needed to in order to cleave to God. The following is a passage where this is stated quite clearly, and will introduce the subject of the immortality of the intellectual soul.
“Eternal life is to God alone, for he lives for ever, and he who is incorporated into his source, namely in Him may He be blessed, also lives forever, because since he is included in the One, and he is one with God, he too will live eternal life... And the main ways one is included in the One is via knowing Him may He be blessed, as is the saying of the wise; “If I would know Him I would be Him.” For the essence of Man is the mind [sechel], hence, in the place where the mind is thinking there is the place of the entire person. When he knows and perceives the knowledge of God he is actually there. The more he knows the more he is included in the source, that is Him may He be Blessed.”
Elsewhere R. Nachman states this in more philosophical terms. “A person needs to raise himself up the imagination into the intellect...Then when he perceives in his mind all that is in the human capability to perceive his mind becomes acquired intellect. As the philosophers have written that there is potential intellect, active intellect and acquired intellect. The person’s main existence after death is only the acquired intellect... Acquired intellect is when a person knows many things with one knowing. Because first one needs to know many introductions prior to knowing a thing. Then when he perceives the thing he discards the introductions and knows the thing with one knowing.”
These passages demonstrate that R. Nachman’s conception of the world-to-come is similar to the Rambam’s Aristotelian intellectual immortality. We further find similarity in the topic of divine providence. Most of the relevant passages on providence have been aptly analyzed in a paper by David Zori. Zori shows that R. Nachman, like Maimonides, posited two possible spheres in which a person can live; nature or providence. The way one can ‘bring down complete providence upon himself’ is by acquiring true knowledge of God. All human suffering is a result one’s being mentally exiled to a world of nature. When one clings to truth he becomes united with God and his providence. Providence is also brought about through the study of Tora, which in R. Nachma’s terminolgy is synonymous with Intellect; the Tora is God’s eye, the closer one is to the Tora the closer one is to the eye. R. Nachman also speaks of providence in symbolic terms, the state of being divinely watched is equated to the spiritual concept of ‘The land of Israel.’ Here too there is a connection to the intellect; “The taste of the land of Israel can only be explained to someone who knows the taste of intellect...only the Talmud scholars who have taste a little of the taste of intellect in their explanations and questions, or the wise men of other [non-Jewish] disciplines who feel the taste of intellect can understand the taste of the land of Israel.”
The act of ‘bringing down providence’ is caused not only by the contemplative knowledge of God, but according to Zori’s interpretation it has to do with how a person views the world. When a person sees the world with divine eyes he causes to world to have order and providence.
Thus far we have seen R. Nachman following the Rambam’s metaphysics in the area of immortality and providence. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that R. Nachman was an Aristotelian thinker. This will become clear from a passage in the second book of Likutei Moharan that dealing with the subject of Sechel that we will now cite at length.
“The main goal and completion [of life] is to serve God with total naivety, without any cleverness. For there are some philosophers that say that the main goal and the world-to-come is only to know every thing in the way it is, like to know a star the way it is; to know its essence and why it stands where it stands. Because there is the intellect, the thinking subject, and the object of thought. In their opinion, this is the ultimate goal and the world-to-come, that these three become united. They while away the whole life on this world; analyzing and perceiving the intellects... in their mind this is the world-to-come, just that while they are enclothed in their bodies they cannot yet feel the full pleasure of intellectual analysis...
In truth, with us [Jews] the main way of reaching the ultimate goal is only through faith and practical mitzvot, to serve God with naivety and simplicity, and via this in itself we merit to what we merit, ‘An eye has not seen it [the world to come] besides for You’... Know that the truth is not like their opinion, God forbid, because if it was very few people would reach the ultimate goal, namely the intellectual philosophers. But what should the people who don’t have the capability to philosophize and perceive the intellects. [These people] are the majority and main part of the world. How will they reach the final goal?”
R. Nachman brings the argument already used by Crescas, that is, it must be that simple people can also reach the ultimate goal, in order to refute Maimonides’ intellectualist scheme of Judaism. Is this a recantation of his acceptance of Aristotilean metaphysics we have seen in the sources above. A careful read of this passage suggests that he is only rejecting the way of life based on Aristotle but not the metaphysical underpinnings. After presenting philosophers’ description on how one cleave to the intellects he says as follows; “In truth, with us [Jews] the main way of reaching the ultimate goal is only through faith and practical mitzvot, to serve God with naivety and simplicity, and via this in itself we merit to what we merit.” I seems to me that he is staying with the philosophers’ description of the ultimate bliss but saying that Jews can reach that place through non-cognitive activities.
This idea can be found in other places in the book where R. Nachman teaches of a variety of activities that can bring down the influx of Sechel. For example, he writes that guarding the five senses awakens the divine influx of intellect. And sometimes when this influx becomes hidden from the person he prescribes shouting out in prayer and Tora study as a way to uncover the hiddenness of the mind. Another practice that brings the intellect is Joy in the performance of the mitzvot. This is the major point of divergence of R. Nachman from the Rambam. Whereas the Rambam makes cognition and contemplation the only path enlightenment R. Nachman provides ways that are open to a wider range of people.
R. Nachman’s introduction of many ways to the intellect does not come to totally replace the straightforward way of wisdom. Rather he reserves the intellectual path for the Zadik, the master of great faith who is able to navigate through the perils of human wisdom.
Conclusion
R. Nachman accepted the basic Aristotelian theory of the intellect and incorporated it into his chassidic system of thought. The place where he strongly disagreed with it is in regard to its practical ramifications. He rejected the idea that cognition is the only way to bliss. The entire psyche needs to be dealt with in order to truly unite with the metaphysical realms.
