In the margins of the German and Jewish Enlightenments: On the life and writings of Solomon Maimon (1753--1800

Solomon Maimon is known for two extraordinary accomplishments within the German and Jewish Enlightenment movements of the 1790s. He was, arguably, the first philosophical critic to truly engage the central problems of Immanuel Kant's great epistemological project in the Critique of Pure Reason and sketch the contours of a post-Kantian Idealism in response, in a series of works beginning with his Versuch Ober die Transcendental Philosophie. He was certainly the first writer to vividly depict the wrenching move of an Eastern European Jew from traditional rabbinic culture to the Western European Enlightenment, in his widely read autobiography, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte.;A single, central philosophical theme animates almost all of Maimon's work from his earliest Hebrew writings, collected in an unpublished Hebrew manuscript entitled Hesheq Shelomo, through his mature German and Hebrew philosophical work, to his self-invention in the Lebensgeschichte . Each of these works is written under the philosophical sign of noetic, or intellectual, perfection, in which the subject strives for a perfect knowledge which would be equivalent to union with the divine mind, which he serially refers to as the Active Intellect, the Shekhina, the infinite intellect, and the world soul. In his Hebrew writings, Maimon uses the Hebrew Aristotelian term of art for such perfection, Shelemut ha-Nefesh (perfection of the soul), along with an associated cluster of Hebrew terms. In German, the word Maimon often uses to express this ideal of perfection is Vollkomenheit.;In recognizing this continuity between Maimon's early unpublished Hebrew work, his mature Hebrew and German philosophical writings and his autobiography, I provide a micro-history of one way in which the medieval Aristotelian ideal of intellectual perfection entered the discourse of modern German Idealism and the changes it underwent in doing so. The point is, however, not merely philosophical, for Maimon employed this ideal in his autobiography to play the role which the German concept of Bildung played in the works of his enlightened contemporaries. The tension between these two ideals is of central importance to a full understanding of Maimon's Lebensgeschichte , which can be described as a Bildatngsroinan without Bildung. I suggest, further, that Maimon was not unique in this respect and that a full understanding of the role of Maimonidean texts and those of radical Aristotelians, more generally, in the early Haskala has yet to be fully accounted for.;Finally, In tracing thematic continuities between Maimon's Hebrew and German works, and showing how they make sense as parts of an individual life at a crucial moment of transition in Jewish and German history, I have also tried to show how secularization and cultural conflict can be expressed in the pain of cultural dislocation and the comedy of hard-won blasphemy. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).