Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 385-406 [Access article in PDF] Some Thoughts on What Spinoza Learned from Maimonides on the Prophetic Imagination Part Two:Spinoza's Maimonideanism Heidi M. Ravven 1. Spinoza's Maimonideanism Now it is precisely with the belief that the prophets were philosophers and the Bible offers veiled insights into the central doctrines of philosophy, so powerfully argued and deeply held by Maimonides that he included it as one of his Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith the acceptance of which is a necessary condition of a share in the World to Come, 1 that Spinoza took strong issue. 2 At the same time, however, Spinoza agreed with Maimonides' doctrine [End Page 385] of the a. imaginative (literary) character 3 and b. the political function 4 of the Bible and of its authors and of the major prophetic figures. The quite obvious influence of Maimonides' account of prophecy upon Spinoza's account in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) has been widely recognized and commented upon. That is to say (although no commentator up till now, as far as I know, has made this point explicit), Spinoza adopted Maimonides' conception of prophecy as mimetic or productive and not only—or chiefly—as receptive. 5 The Maimonidean account of the (prophetic) imagination clarifies why the atomic fact model of the receptive function of the imagination is inapplicable to the TTP. The imaginative character of prophecy is not about picking up information (in a dream or otherwise) delivered from God; rather, it concerns how one understands (and presents) certain truths (in the case of Spinoza's notion of prophecy, namely, those of ethics and in Maimonides' those of science as well as of ethics) imaginatively rather than rationally, i.e., within a web of (narrative and symbolic) associations instead of within the deductive order of rational causal explanation. "Now we see," Spinoza, in the first chapter [End Page 386] of the Tractatus, 6 writes, echoing Maimonides (esp. Guide II, 47), "why the teachings of the prophets were nearly all in the form of parables and allegories, and why all spiritual matters were expressed in corporeal form, for this is more appropriate to the imaginative faculty." Prophecy does not consist in the simple reception of pieces of information transmitted directly from God. This is not what it is for Maimonides nor for Spinoza.Thus we find that Spinoza formally defines the prophet in the beginning of TTP, chapter i, as "one who interprets (interpretatur) God's revelations to those who cannot attain to certain knowledge of the matters revealed... For the Hebrew word for prophet is nabi, that is, speaker and interpreter (orator et interpres)." 7 The prophet is interpreter in imaginative terms, whether he reformulates belief imaginatively or instead merely understands it in that way himself to begin with. Prophecy is an imaginative (narrative, symbolic) rather than a philosophical (logical and demonstrable) type of understanding and presentation. If one looks at Spinoza's account of prophecy in TTP i, one finds that immediately after Spinoza defines prophecy, he then goes on to tell us what revelation is scientifically: "the nature of [the human] mind... is the primary cause of divine revelation." That is to say, the mind itself, whether rationally in intellectual thought or in its imaginative capacity and in both cases as itself a product of divine (i.e., natural) causes, supplies the content of revelation. 8 Spinoza then goes on to say that now that we have understood the true explanation of prophecy, we must return from this scientific understanding to the biblical account of prophecy. At that point he tells us that "the Jews never make mention of intermediate or particular causes nor pay any heed to them, but to serve religion and piety... they refer everything to God." Now this is a crucial passage and must be used as an interpretive principle for all that follows. (Spinoza illustrates the point in some detail at the end of the chapter where he lists the various...