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בס"ד Aristotle and Maimonides describe man's Soul On the Soul and its PowersMaimonides writes Eight Chapters (shemone perakim) as an Introduction to the Mishna, Ethics of the Fathers, (Pirkei Avot). He examines the function of ethics for the well being of the soul, the necessity of such well being for the person who seeks to understand the Creator and states a theory of behaviour to be followed in order to achieve that goal. Chapter one is largely descriptive. 1. Know that the soul of man is one. Indeed, as Rav Aviner stresses in his edition of the Shemone Perakim, man is one, where body and soul interact. It is significant that the Aristotelian divisions of the 'soul' that Rambam adopts are largely physical. Early philosophers, we are told, were confused and believed that the various active areas of functioning indicated a plurality of souls in man. To understand man, we need to know that he is one whole. 2. Know that the improvement (tikkun) of our character traits (middot)
is brought about by curing the soul (refuat ha nefesh). Rambam explains that, just as a physician needs to know the details of
physiology before he can cure anyone, so the rofe nefesh 'soul doctor/psychologist/moralist' needs to know and understand the functions of
the soul/ psyche. There are five of these; they control: 3. Man's nutrition stems from the nutritive faculty in the human soul,
whereas a donkey…derives its nutrition from the nutritive faculty in the
donkey's soul. NB the use of the word nefesh when referring both to humans and to animals. Both have a 'soul', but they are not comparable. We use the words, 'food', 'sensation' for both, but only the term, not the meaning is common to both. Every species has a soul, a way of behaving, specific to it. Rambam illustrates this with an example, - not his - of light that lights up three dark places, one is lit by the sun, one by the moon and one by fire (man made). There is light in all three, but in each case it is of a different kind, though we use the word 'light' for all three. Similarly, we use the word nefesh and, as with the light, only the term is common to man and animals. 4. The element that controls nutrition includes the power to ingest, store
food, digest, excrete, grow, reproduce and the ability to distinguish
liquids that sustain and those to be excreted. Sentient. This area refers to the five senses throughout the physical body. The 'soul' interprets and reacts to these, Rambam implies. Imagination. Rambam defines this as memory able to recall sensations, to combine or divide up such sensations and thus create impossible combinations - an iron ship flying in the sky, for example. This faculty can delude man (the intellectual function is able to sort this out). Rambam makes the point that not everything that it is possible to imagine may be real, even if all the constituent parts of something may have been real. Science was to grapple with this question for several hundred more years. Stimulation. A person is stimulated to desire or to reject things. Thus one may love or hate, desire or fear something and the physical organs, legs, hands, eyes will react accordingly; the physical heart is responsible for courage. 5. The function of thought/conceptualising is the power given to man…. The intellect can deal with the abstract notions, understand the eternal
values and thus acquire wisdom - knowledge.
The intellect can also determine life style in a concrete way (applied, ma'asi) and thus a. discriminate between true and false ( as e.g. when the
imagination presents impossible things and 6. If the soul be without knowledge, it is not good (Prov.19,2) The details, says Rambam, are not important here, since they are not needed for a discussion about middot (ethics). However, the difference that exists between the functions of the soul need to be clear to the teacher of ethics to enable him to 'heal' that soul and ensure its 'health'. An interesting philosophical perspective emerges of the Greek and Jewish attitudes to the 'soul', the essence of things. Plato sees this world in terms of the shadows of a cave reflecting the essentially real Ideas outside of it. Aristotle speaks of the essential, the real within a being. The Torah teaches that man was created 'in the image of G-d' . Maimonides is telling us that the healthy, ethical soul is the real essence of the person and that once it is achieved it will constitute that 'image of G-d'. |
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