Saadia Gaon (d. 941) inaugurated Jewish philosophical ethics in the tenth treatise of al Amana wa-l-i‘tiqadat (The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs) (Rosenblatt 1948). Saadia wrote this text to defend rabbinic Judaism against the critique of the Karaites, Jews who regarded Scripture alone as normative source of Jewish law and who denied the authority of rabbinic Oral Law. Following the example of the Mu'tazilite school of kalam (i. e., Muslim speculative theology), Saadia attempted to demonstrate that rational arguments are compatible with Scriptural and rabbinic teachings. As a Jewish Mu'tazilite, he was concerned with the themes of divine unity, divine justice, rewards and punishments, and good and evil actions. Saadia was the first to introduce philosophical anthropology as the basis of Jewish ethics and the first to note that the goal of Jewish philosophic learning is the attainment of happiness.
Saadia establishes that happiness pertains to the quality of the human soul and, therefore, he examines various theories on the nature of the human soul and its association with the body. According to Saadia, humans are a temporary combination of two substances - body and soul - both created by God and are united by him. The soul is not strictly speaking a non-corporeal substance; rather, it is made of a refined substance that is not devoid of matter altogether, even though it is qualitatively different from the corporeal body, ‘‘a dark place’’ in which the luminous soul is imprisoned for the duration of its life on earth. The human soul needs the body as its instrument of action and, therefore, the well-being of the soul is predicated on the well-being of the body, although the latter requires control of the body by the soul.
The interdependence of body and soul explains why Saadia insists on the doctrine of bodily resurrection: even though on earth the two substances separate and the soul of the righteous continues to live on as immortal substance, in the end of time as a result of divine intervention, the individual soul will be recombined with its corresponding body. For the duration of human life on earth, a proper balance between soul and body constitutes the morally good life, for which one is rewarded with eternal life and the recombination of body and soul in the eschatological remote future. The ethically good life is thus a balanced life in which all the aspects of the human composite are given appropriate expression within a hierarchy of goods. The ideal practice that yields the good life is rooted in moderation and self-control, but Saadia does not provide the details how to achieve the ideal balance because the moral path is already charted by the precepts of the revealed Torah as interpreted by the rabbis.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, two strands shaped Jewish philosophical ethics in Islam: the sociocultural program known as adab and systematic philosophy (falsafa), especially the blend of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism generated by the Isma'ilis. The adab culture was based on knowledge culled from prose books of tales, fables, anecdotes, practical advice, and popularization of scientific information, all gleaned from the philosophic and scientific heritage of the Hellenistic world interspersed with some material from India. In the adab program the Hellenistic ideals of moderation and selfcontrol were combined with educational ideals that fit the needs of the Muslim state and the peculiarities of the Muslim religion. The philosophers (falasifa) shared the adab culture but went beyond it by establishing ethics as ‘‘the science of character’’ (ilm al-Ahklaq) (Fakhry 1994). These speculations were based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics which was translated into Arabic by Ishaq b. Hunayn (d. 911). The most thorough reworking of Greek ethics in Islam was articulated by al-FarabI (d. 950), who composed a commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (no longer extant) as well as systematic reflections on happiness in several works. His fusion of Aristotelian ethics, Plato’s political philosophy, and Plotinus metaphysics will exert deep influence on Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), but until then Jewish philosophers were influenced by the Isma'Ili strand of Shl'ite Islam whose, spread by the religious brotherhood from Basra, Ikhwan al-Safa’ (Sincere Brethren of Purity). Their philosophic encyclopedia blended elements from Neo-Pythagorean-ism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Aristotelianism, an amalgam that did not appear to threaten the religious mentality of Muslims or Jews, because it retained the belief in the personal immortality and viewed the pursuit of intellectual perfection as a religious activity.
Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. 1058) in Muslim Spain is a typical example of a Jewish thinker whose ethics combined the adah culture with the Aristotelian ‘‘science of character’’ and Isma'ili metaphysics. Gabirol drew on Hunayn b. Isltaq’s collection of aphoristic, biographical, g;nomic, anecdotal literature entitled Adah al-Falasifa, which was translated into Hebrew under the title Musrey ha-Philosophim (The Moral Teachings of the Philosophers). For this reason, another collection of Arabic moral aphorisms that circulated in a Hebrew translation under the title Mivhar ha-Peninim (Choice of Pearls) was attributed to Solomon ibn Gabirol. From the vast encyclopedic knowledge of Arabic learning, Ibn Gabirol culled his philosophic-scientific knowledge, molding it all into his own philosophy that had a strong Neoplatonic tinge, while also departing from prevailing Neoplatonism on some important points. His Islakh al-Akhlaq (Tikkun Middot ha-Nefesh; Improvement of Moral Qualities) is a distinct Jewish contribution to the ‘‘science of character’’ in Islamic philosophy.
For Gabirol, human temperaments are rooted in human physiology, as understood by the medical ethics of Galen and Hippocrates. Hence, moral training is biologically based. Echoing a common theme in the writings of the Ikhwan, Gabirol presents the human species as a microcosm in which the four elements and the four humors reflect the mathematical assumptions of the Pythagorean tradition. The rational soul is defined as ‘‘pure, stainless, and simple’’ and the proper management of the body by the soul should exhibit the control of the rational soul. Human well-being in this life requires the hegemony of reason over the passions and appetites of the body. If reason fails, one falls prey to the irrational desire of the body and loses the ‘‘enduring happiness which man can reason in the intellectual world, the world to come’’ (Wise 1966 [1902]:31). The principles that underlie proper human conduct constitute the medicine of the soul, which is analogous to the medicine of the body. The wise man is like ‘‘skillful physician who prepares prescriptions, taking of every medicine a divine quality’’ (Wise 1966 [1902]:34).
The ultimate end of this medical management is not life in the temporal order but rather the everlasting existing of the rational soul in the intelligible realm. The ideal person is one who reaches a well-balanced condition of body and soul: he makes the rational soul govern his passions. The ideal virtues include: meekness, modesty, capacity to love, compassion and mercy, cheerfulness and good disposition, good will and contentment, alertness, generosity and valor. The vices include price, impudence, capacity to hate, cruelty, wrath, envy, sloth, niggardliness, and cowardice. The virtues are generally in accord with rabbinic tradition, except for the virtue of magnanimity, which reflects his courtier social setting. The moral life means the conditioning (or “improvement”) of the soul’s desire: by perfecting oneself morally and intellectually the human soul can attain the ultimate religious goal of human life.
Other Jewish philosophers in the eleventh century - Joseph ibn Zaddik and Abraham bar Hiyya - shared this outlook, whose most elaborate expression can be found in the work of Bahya ibn Paquda (d. 1156) Fara’id al Quluh (Hovot ha-Levavot, Duties of the Heart) (Mansoor 1973). Ibn Paquda shared the intellectualist religiosity of the Jewish thinkers and the Neoplatonic metaphysics presupposed by them, but he was critical of a superficial endorsement of the adah culture among the Jewish courtiers. He held that the essence of being human is the intellect and human well-being depends on the excellence of the intellect. Since the rational soul does not belong to this world, the happiness of the soul cannot be experienced in this world, but only in the afterlife. The quality of one’s life will determine whether or not the individual rational soul will attain the desired perfection. Bahya’s book is most similar in orientation to al-GGazall’s Kimyat-yi Saadat (The Alchemy of Happiness) whose goal was to show how life in accordance with the teaching of the Qur’an leads to love of God, the ultimate end of human life. Like al-GGazall, Bahya offers a therapeutic program that can either prevent the sickness of the soul or halt it in case sickness takes root. Yet the proper care of the soul is feasible only for those who possess an accurate knowledge of the structure of the universe created by God and a correct understanding of the human condition.
By the mid-twelfth century the notion that happiness pertains to the perfection of the soul and that it is attainable for those who observe the Torah and ensure that their reason controls their emotion and bodily urges was shared by many Jewish philosophers. However, the more Jewish philosophers gained access to the teachings of Aristotle, the more they understood the perfection of the soul exclusively in terms of perfection of the rational soul, namely, the intellect. Consequently, reflections on virtue and happiness were now intertwined with an elaborate theory of knowledge and much of it was derived from the Hellenistic commentators on Aristotle.
The most extensive integration of Aristotelianism and Jewish ethics was effected by Moses Maimonides. Although he was deeply indebted to Muslim and Jewish predecessors, especially al-FarabI, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Gabirol, and Ibn Paduada, Maimonides created a new ethical discourse on virtue and happiness by making explicit the Aristotelian foundation of rabbinic ethics (Weiss 1991). For Maimonides, Aristotle’s teachings, to the extent that they are true, are perfectly compatible with the revealed Torah and that as such they are authoritative to Jews. Moreover, Maimonides claims that the Torah should be read as an esoteric text whose inner meaning is identical with Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics. The Torah teaches philosophical truths necessary for the attainment of happiness in the language of human beings, namely through figurative speech. Finally Maimonides claims that the Torah established the ideal political regime in which human happiness can be attained, provided one know how to interpret the Torah correctly and understands its philosophical meaning.
Maimonides adopts the Aristotelian notion that to become morally virtuous humans must practice the middle way (Weiss and Butterworth 1975), but he also departed from the Aristotelian ideal in some important respects. Maimonides agrees with Aristotle that a human being is born with certain disposition, due to a particular material make up, and that humans can acquire good character traits by habitually practicing good deeds. When humans act ‘‘just right’’ they acquire the intrinsic states of character out of which flow good actions. Mai-monides has to work out the tension between moderation and supererogation that existed in rabbinic moral philosophy. He does so by asserting that the middle between extremes characterizes God’s mode of operation; the ways of God describe those moderate traits. The Torah commands humans to walk in God’s path, namely, to choose the mean between extreme (Maimonides 1949, Hilkhot Deot 28:9).
The moral virtues require the exercise of practical reasoning, and its excellence is the virtue of practical wisdom. On the surface it seems that practical reasoning is unnecessary because the Torah itself determines what the right action is in each and every case. Yet practical reason played an important role in Maimonides’ virtue ethics (Kreisel 1999). On the basis of al-Farabl’s Aphorisms of the Statesman, Maimonides speaks about the practical intellect (‘aql al-‘amalt) as a faculty involved in ethics and politics, enabling humans to govern, and to produce ‘‘knowledge of the regimen to be adopted by the individual or by society in the pursuit of its well being’’ (Kreisel 1999:75) Maimonides, however, subsumed practical reason into the activity of the imagination, a mental capacity that is particularly strong among prophets and legislators, all except the Prophet Moses, whose imagination was perfect, but whose prophetic experience itself did not involve the imagination. It was only the communication of Moses’ perfect cognitive experience to the people of
Israel at Sinai that involved the power of imagination, translating conceptual knowledge into figurative speech. Much of Maimonides’ philosophical ethics focuses on analysis of the perfection of Moses’ prophecy that anchors the perfection of Mosaic Law.
Practical wisdom is indeed an intellectual virtue that features prominently in the good life, but it does not constitute the ultimate end of human life; that status is reserved to theoretical wisdom. To be fully perfect, the human intellect must transcend the feature that makes it human, namely, its association with the body (Kellner 1991). By cognizing the intelligible order of reality, the human rational potential is both actualized and substantialized. The perfect intellect - the acquired intellect - is a substance separable from the body as Aristotle hinted in De anima III:3. This state of being is what the rabbis designated as the world-to-come (olam ha-ba), which Maimonides defines as ‘‘the ultimate end toward which all our efforts ought to be devoted... the ultimate and perfect reward, the final bliss that will suffer neither interruption nor diminution’’(Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 9:2). Maimonides’ interpretation of olam ha-ba diminishes the apocalyptic and eschatological features of that concept in rabbinic Judaism, since olam ha-ba is but a state of being of the perfected rational soul. But who can achieve such elevated state of being? Maimonides leaves the answer to this question rather obscure, giving rise to on-going controversy. In general, Maimonides understood olam ha-ba as an ideal whose pursuit gives direction to human life, but whose attainment is nearly impossible because it requires acquisition of the sciences, as well as acting in accordance with the Torah’s prescriptions. Such restrictive interpretation of olam ha-ba makes the traditional belief in personal immortality highly suspect. While Maimonides listed this belief among the Thirteen Dogmas of Judaism, he viewed it as necessary for the life of the Jewish polity rather than a true belief.
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