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Life and Humanity

The most convenient place to begin reading about how Maimonides understands what it means to be human is in the earliest of his major works, his commentary on the Mishnah, which is a running commentary that also contains some longer, more elaborate sections. These include an introduction to the entire Mishnah as well as introductions to other sections that count as standalone pieces in their own right. One of them became known as Eight Chapters, and serves as the introduction to a part called Sayings of the Fathers. Sayings is an unusual piece of the Mishnah since, unlike other Mishnaic tractates, its main focus is not legal. Instead, it consists of a collection of sayings and proverbs attributed to various sages. Nevertheless, it is situated towards the end of a part of the Mishnah that deals with damages and legal disagreements. Maimonides says that such a position is appropriate because Sayings is crucial for the judges who rule on the basis of these Mishnaic discussions. The reason is that in Sayings, the sages teach behaviour required in order to form positive character traits and judges are those most in need of virtuous character. Judges need to be in control when in session so as not to reveal things to witnesses. A judge also needs to be in control outside of the courtroom, so as to be respected by the public who must abide by adjudications. Moreover, it is particularly important for people with such positions to possess good character, as a vicious judge would harm not only herself. Vicious judges harm others too. A judge needs to be temperate, of steadfast character, and to be resolute, otherwise her rulings could be influenced by extraneous and tangential factors. Sayings of the Fathers is therefore a crucial aspect of the Mishnah’s judicial parts.

Although Sayings is appropriately situated because of its relevance to those passing judgement, Maimonides explains that it is important for everyone, since good character is necessary for humans to flourish. Accordingly, Sayings teaches not only about character traits, but virtues generally, and that includes the intellectual virtues. At one point in the commentary, Maimonides states that the goal of the tractate is to ‘provide education for a person to aid in the endeavour to improve his soul through virtues of character traits and reason’. As it is an introduction to the tractate, Eight Chapters therefore explains how humans must behave in order to perfect their souls. To understand Maimonides’ view of Sayings of the Fathers adequately, then, one must understand what he means by soul generally, and by the human soul in particular which, as will become clear, is equivalent to understanding what it is to be a human. Since Maimonides outlines the soul only very concisely, in the first of the Eight Chapters, it will be helpful to elaborate on what his view entails. In doing so, I will sometimes depart from Maimonides’ own texts in order to explain some background ideas that I think are helpful.

Maimonides adopts a standard Aristotelian account of the soul. It is one that might seem surprising to many today. There is a widespread tendency among the general population to think that souls and bodies are two separate things that are combined into a person, and that, if there really is any such thing as a soul, body and soul both continue to exist in their different ways after the person has ceased to be. Sometimes a soul is then considered to be the true essence of a person, while the body is merely a vessel containing it, which it uses in order to function in the material world. This is not what Maimonides means by soul. In his view, as for Aristotle, both bodies and souls are components of a human, but neither exists as particularly human bodies or souls independently of one another. Neither a human soul nor a human body is enough to make up a person. Humans have bodies but are not their bodies. I am different from this particular piece of matter that is my body. I was me several years ago when my body was different and even made up of different atoms. Moreover, were I to die, what is now my body would no longer be me. It would not be a human being at all, but a corpse. As a human being is a psycho-physical entity, it is also true of my soul that it would not be me if it is divested of body. A soul is a component of a thing that is alive but a soul does not exist without a body.

While it is true to say that Maimonides considered the soul to be in some sense equivalent to the ‘essence’, what is meant is not that the soul is more authentically human than a human body, but that the soul accounts for what kind of thing a person is; ‘soul is the “form” of a natural body that is potentially alive’.1 A distinction between ‘form’ and ‘body’, or ‘form’ and ‘matter’, explains how there can be different things of the same kind. We can distinguish objects as different things either by describing their different features or by locating them in different physical spaces. There are oak trees and panthers, and we can explain that they are different kinds of things because of the differences in their natures and in the ways they behave. One is a kind of vegetation and the other is a kind of feline. The differences between two separate oak trees cannot be explained in this way. Of course, two oaks might have different accidental features, like size or age, but they cannot be distinguished by different natures, as they both possess the nature of an oak tree. Instead, they are differentiated by being separate material substances. A substance is something that exists in its own right, not as part of something else, so a tree is a substance, while its colour is an accident that exists in it. The idea that a substance’s form tells you what the thing is can be expressed by saying that the form is what accounts for its nature, so is shared by objects of a single species, while the matter of these things is their individuating principle. There is an analogy in how a piece of wood can be divided up and made into a table and a chair. What the objects are does not depend on the piece of wood they are made out of but on the form that the carpenter imposes on them. Form is what makes something what it is. In the case of two chairs with identical forms, they are distinguished by being in different bits of matter. However, if all you know is that the object is made out of wood, that doesn’t give you information about what it is, whether it is a table or a chair. You know what the object is by knowing what form it has.

It may seem that knowing the form is not enough, however, because we are said to know something when we know all of its causes, and Aristotle divides causes into four kinds. Matter and form are the material and formal causes, and objects also have final and efficient causes. It is clear that knowing something must include knowing at least the formal cause, since the formal cause is an object’s nature, its form. A final cause is the object’s aim or purpose, so the chair’s final cause is to be sat on. In certain cases, formal and final causes can be identified with one another: in order to see what something is, you look at its characteristic behaviour, what it tends to do. Consider a seed, for example, which has the formal cause of a tree. Given the right conditions, the seed automatically grows into the tree. The formal cause is in the seed potentially and in the tree actually, as the tree results from a process of the form’s actualisation. A seed has a natural tendency to grow into a tree, to actualise its form. This is what the object aims at, and is its final cause or its purpose. It is also what is good for the object, because everything aims at its own good and its actualisation, so Aristotle writes that ‘the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim’.2 Since the final cause expresses the tendency that the nature imbues, which is the object’s goal and what is good for it, the formal and final causes of the potential tree can be identified with one another. The efficient cause is also the same as the formal cause, since ‘like causes like’, which is to say that something causes something else of the same kind to come to be. This is most obvious in natural generation: A horse gives birth to a foal and an owl to an owlet. Offspring share the nature of their parents, their formal cause. The formal and final causes, the nature and its purpose, are therefore shared by the object and its efficient cause. To know an animal properly is to know these causes. Knowing them would also grant a kind of understanding of the material cause, since the knowledge would include knowing what sort of matter a certain object is made out of, like bone or bark. To know something’s causes is therefore to know its nature.

As the form of a living body, soul is a particular kind of form. A soul is considered a principle of life, so anything that is alive in any way has a soul. For the Aristotelians, investigating the soul is the same as investigating what it means to say that something is alive, that it is animate. On their view, every animal is said to have a soul, since all animals are animate. Plants are also alive, so plants have souls too. To be alive is to be a self-mover, with the capacity to grow and reproduce. Living things therefore have an internal principle of motion. Such a principle distinguishes them from inanimate objects, which do not move themselves but, instead, are moved by something...