Is The Intellectual Project Spiritual?
Maimonides, Aristotle, and the Future of Religious Reason
Maimonides, according to Moshe Halbertal, saw “philosophy and science as the medium for attaining the heights of religious experience—love and awe.”
For Maimonides, the philosophical quest was religious, the intellectual endeavor spiritual. Thus, Aristotle was—in his estimation—one of the greatest human beings to have ever lived, attaining the height of knowing God.
The conclusion—coming from a medieval Jewish thinker— is surprising given that 1) Aristotle was not Jewish and 2) believed many things that traditional Jews thought to be heretical, for example, that there was no beginning and end to the world, and that God was impersonal (“thought thinking itself”).
1) Do you agree with Maimonides that intellectual greatness is a form of spiritual greatness? Both Kierkegaard and Richard Dawkins would disagree (from opposite sides of the aisle).
2) If you think there is a thinker better than Aristotle does the Maimonidean project need to be updated to accommodate the new thinker, or does it only work if you accept its underlying Aristotelianism? Can a belief in Aristotle’s monumental greatness survive the scientific revolution? Or does the medieval project of fusing religion and philosophy seem quaint in the 21st century?
3) Assuming that systematic thought is still possible and/or desirable, and assuming that religious texts and practices should be read creatively through the lens of the best thinkers, who do you nominate as the thinkers that can best save religion from being embarrassed by reason? And if systematic thought is not possible and/or undesirable, are there thinkers you would nonetheless nominate for the project?
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This reminds me of the path that Lawrence Kohlberg took in his development psychology of moral reasoning (flawed though his research was). He ended up I think saying that the person who achieved the highest stage of moral reasoning also eliminated the distance between the mind and action, actually achieved virtue both viewed from the outside and experienced inside. So I would reframe or follow up: As you get farther from Aristotle (or fill-in-the-blank) what is the relationship between the spiritual and the intellectual? And is one or the other side of that equation a better or more acceleration path, or is it just different for different people?