 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, With All Your Heart, Ethics and Judaism. One day a silent film comedian named Charlie decided he wanted to kill a rival for the affections of the girl he was sweet on. He chose a weapon that had served him well in the past, a banana skin, to be dropped on the street just in front of an open manhole cover as the rival passed by. But at the last minute, the rival veered away to buy a newspaper, escaping harm and not even noticing his brush with death. As fate would have it, across town another silent film comedian named Buster was also plotting murder most foul. He too wanted to bump off a rival and likewise selected a banana skin as his instrument. In this case, the plan worked and the rival slipped to a sewery doom. Buster thought it was the perfect crime, but he was arrested and at the trial the banana skin was presented in evidence covered with his fingerprints. Yes, he lost on appeal. Fate was not yet satisfied though. On that very same day, a third comedian named Harold finished eating a banana and negligently tossed the banana skin onto the street rather than depositing it in a litter basket. A complete stranger half and by slipped on the banana skin and fell into an open manhole cover to Harold's horror. Now, how should we judge our three comedians from an ethical point of view? Should we evaluate their actions on the basis of their intentions or the consequences their actions produced? If we go with intentions, then it looks like Buster is no worse than Charlie. Both of them intended to kill their rival, and the fact that Buster succeeded is a matter of luck. Yet, at least in the law, we do place some weight on consequences. Charlie would be guilty of attempted murder and face a lesser sentence than the successful murderer Buster. On the other hand, if it's consequences that matter, then it looks like Harold should be blamed for bringing about a death even though he had no intention of doing so. Yet maybe we do blame him at least a little. Certainly he's guilty of littering, and we might think he has an obligation to be more careful with his banana peels. It seems abundantly clear though that he is less morally blameworthy than Buster who deliberately killed someone despite the fact that the outcome of their actions was the same. So our examples seem to show two things. First, there may be a case for restricting the possession of bananas by silent film actors. Second, in moral deliberations both intention and consequence matter. This applies to the good just as much as the bad. If I intend wholeheartedly to save someone's life but don't manage it, I will not be seen as a hero. But neither am I a genuine hero if I save someone's life but without meaning to or out of the wrong motive. Imagine someone who rescues a drowning child solely in the hope that the child's parents will offer money as a reward. So goodness has both an external and an internal aspect. It's not enough to do the right thing, you must do it for the right reason. This is the central point of a wonderful treatise which gets too little attention from historians of philosophy, The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, written by the 11th century Jewish philosopher of Andalusia, Bahia ibn Pakuda. We don't know much about him or his life apart from the fact that he served as a judge, but Ibn Pakuda's treatise on the duties of the heart became a favorite text among later Jews, a highlight of what is sometimes called pietistic literature. Ibn Pakuda explains the purposes of his treatise in the same terms I have just used, by saying that good actions, the actions that are pleasing to God, have an internal as well as an external aspect. Whether we are performing a religious ritual or helping a neighbor, we cannot simply go through the motions, we must act sincerely, avoiding any taint of hypocrisy. Though this may seem a rather obvious point, it is one Ibn Pakuda thinks has been widely ignored in the writings of his co-religionists. They have written only of our outer duties, such as the motions and actions to be performed in sacrifice or in our relations to other people, and to be fair, there was plenty for them to discuss. Ibn Pakuda counts 613 kinds of external duty placed upon the Jews by God. But the internal duties, the duties of the heart, are limitless. In concentrating on the obvious, the visible, the external, previous authors have missed what is decisive in good action, which is like focusing on the expression of words at the expense of their meaning. This is the gap Ibn Pakuda wants to fill, by giving his readers guidance and encouragement in purifying their desires, intentions, or will, what he calls the heart. For him, the actions we perform and their consequences do matter, but not nearly as much as the intentions that underlie them. In fact, he insists that a good intention that is thwarted has more moral weight than a good action by itself. So his treatise is a work of ethical exhortation and advice which should bring us to have the right intentions. It is however not a general work of ethics. The context is explicitly a religious one, not only because Ibn Pakuda frequently quotes scripture and traditional rabbinic texts, but also because the duties he has in mind are laid on us by God. Human reason is not in a position to discern the full range of our obligations. This is why the law was revealed. In fact, different people are given different duties, corresponding to the blessings God has given them. God expects more from those who can do more, and from those He has helped. Thus the Jews have many external duties, such as the obeying of dietary laws that other people do not have, because God delivered them from Egypt to the Promised Land. Likewise, prophets are placed under obligations to God that do not apply to the rest of us. But of course, Ibn Pakuda is not here to tell us about the external duties required by the law. That is what earlier authors have done. Rather, he is here to explain what it means to have good intentions, and how we can develop them. So, the theological presuppositions of the work do not prevent Ibn Pakuda from making use of a wide range of ethical material. Some of this is drawn from popular philosophical literature. Once upon a time, I mentioned that Seneca tells an anecdote about Plato, in which he refused to beat a slave on the grounds that he was still angry. In Ibn Pakuda, this story reappears, albeit assigned to an anonymous ruler, rather than Plato. It's only one of many memorable and compelling stories offered by Ibn Pakuda. Maybe my favorite is a parable about a city in India, where the people would choose a new king each year but then, without warning, exile him. One canny ruler discovered what the people had in mind. So he used his time on the throne to seize wealth from the city and send it abroad. When he was exiled, he happily went off to find his amassed wealth waiting for him. In the same way, we should spend our limited time on earth focusing on a heavenly reward, rather than a fortune in this life. As the use of such stories suggests, Ibn Pakuda is the most user-friendly of writers. He even presents his advice in the form of numbered lists to make them easier to memorize. The advice is deeply humane. Admittedly, he demands much of his reader. Every action we perform, no matter how small, should be performed in such a way as to please God. He often compares our relation to God to that between a subject and a king, or between a servant and a master, and he assumes that a perfect servant will think of nothing but the interests of his master. Still, Ibn Pakuda realizes that this is expecting a lot, and identifies many steps we can take along the path to that goal. Ideally, we should be motivated by obedience to and love for God, yet Ibn Pakuda often gives us other reasons that we might find more persuasive, given our human frailties. It is better to act rightly even if we only do so in hope that God will reward us with wealth or a large family. Only at a higher stage of ethical development will we learn to make our happiness independent of such things. Here it is instructive to compare Ibn Pakuda's stance to that of the Stoics. As you might recall, they too rejected external goods as being of no real significance. Wealth or family do not motivate the Stoic sage. But unlike the Stoics, Ibn Pakuda is willing to meet the non-sage halfway, with his encouraging message that we can make real progress even while our values remain imperfect. In fact, he thinks that one of the most important and praiseworthy duties of the heart is repentance, which presupposes that we have done wrong, either in our intentions or in our actions. No Stoic would say, as Ibn Pakuda does, that the penitent man may be better than one who committed no wrong in the first place. The philosophical interest of Ibn Pakuda's writing does not lie just in its unprecedented focus on intentions. He also applies his idea about internal duty to beliefs. We should not be satisfied to believe the truth if we can go further and actually establish or demonstrate what is true. Knowledge and proof relate to true beliefs the way that good intentions relate to right actions. So, like many other authors we've looked at in the Islamic world, he attacks taqlid, the uncritical acceptance of authority. Being Ibn Pakuda, he offers a nice parable to illustrate the point. If a servant were asked to weigh money for a king and lazily assign this important task to someone else, he would still be blameworthy even if the king wound up with the right answer. Ibn Pakuda puts his own beliefs in the balance by deploying the arguments of philosophy to prove central tenets of Judaism. In particular, he argues against the eternity of the world and for the oneness of God. Like Muslim theologians, he sees God's oneness, or tawhid, as the most important doctrine of his faith. The arguments in this part of the text are remarkably similar to those we find in al-Kindi's On First philosophy. With his emphasis on the need to demonstrate what other Jews merely believe, Ibn Pakuda is more like a later Muslim philosopher, also of Andalusia, of Verruese. It's rather surprising to see the core idea of of Verruese's decisive treatise showing up generations earlier in a deeply pious work of Jewish ethical teaching. In fact, the valorization of proof over belief, of philosophical demonstration over obedience to authority, seems to be a general feature of philosophy in Andalusia, embraced by Jews and Muslims alike. Averruese is only the most famous example of this do-it-yourself attitude in epistemology. That's not to say, of course, that Ibn Pakuda was as rationalist an author as a Verruese. We've already seen that he thinks reason is incapable of establishing most of our God-given duties. But nor was it impossible for Jewish thinkers to embrace Aristotle in something like the way Averruese did. Jews started to do precisely this in the 12th century, the age of Averruese. One of the philosophers we looked at last time, Ibn Dawud, was a pretty dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian, and so was the greatest thinker of Andalusian Judaism, Maimonides. His ethical writings make for an interesting contrast to Ibn Pakuda. As we saw in an earlier episode, the main influences on Arabic ethical writing of the formative period were Aristotle and Galen. There is little trace of either in Ibn Pakuda, though at one point he does speak in rather Aristotelian terms of moderation concerning things that are neither forbidden nor commanded by the law. Maimonides, by contrast, draws on Aristotle's and Galen's ideas in practically every page of his writings on ethics. Actually, he did not dedicate any work solely to ethics. The subject is instead discussed in parts of larger works, for example a section of his commentary on the Mishnah, often called the Eight Chapters. Here and elsewhere, he follows Galen's ethical writings by encouraging us to cure the soul of its ills, which are, of course, vicious character traits. Like Galen and his followers in the Arabic-speaking world, Maimonides sees this process in terms of subordinating the lower parts of the soul to reason. So he thinks that knowledge is indispensable for the goodness of soul. Maimonides again follows this Galenic ethical tradition by accepting that we are already born with ethical tendencies, a result of our innate physical makeup with which we are born. Fortunately, we can overcome these tendencies by training. If you're the sort of person who gets angry easily, angry enough to try to kill people with fruit maybe, you aren't doomed to be a bad seed, you can cultivate good character traits by practicing to hold your temper. As we've seen before, this idea of habituation provides a convenient link between Galenic ethics and Aristotelian ethics. And more than any of the other ethicists we have examined in the Islamic world, with the exception of Miskaway, Maimonides is an enthusiastic proponent of Aristotle's ethics. He finds the theory of the mean particularly fruitful. Normally, the best ethical disposition is the one that is between two extremes, for instance, courage between cowardice and rashness, or modesty between impudence and shyness. But it won't do for Maimonides simply to reassert the Aristotelian theory. Each of his significant discussions of ethics is found, as I've said, in a larger treatise where his wider goal is to give an account of the law, or of rabbinic literature. So he cannot just overlook possible tensions between the Jewish tradition and the Aristotelian ethical theory. We saw last time that his predecessor Ibn Dawud insisted on the total agreements between philosophy and the Torah. Maimonides has a more nuanced view of this relationship, freely admitting that there are differences of opinion between Athens and Jerusalem. In fact, we saw an example of that last time, too. Maimonides's letter on astrology allowed for a divergence of views between philosophy and the Torah concerning divine providence. Still, in his ethical writings his main goal is to reconcile his philosophical and religious sources. For this project, the most obvious problem concerns precisely the Aristotelian idea of virtue as a mean between extremes. In Judaism, the virtuous man often seems to be one whose character traits are extreme rather than moderate. For instance, in Genesis, Abraham restrains himself from gazing upon his own wife, Sarah, and from taking any spoils of war after victory in battle. Such actions are above and beyond the call, and seem to show Abraham as a kind of ascetic. Maimonides obviously doesn't want to deny that they are admirable, but neither can he plausibly portray them as illustrating Aristotle's doctrine of the mean. Of course, as a good Aristotelian he knows that the solution to a problem with Aristotle is always more Aristotle. If we think back to the Nicomachean ethics, we may recall Aristotle advising us that it can be a good idea deliberately to tend towards one of two extremes, depending on the character traits we find in ourselves. This advice is much like what we just saw with Galen. If you diagnose yourself as an angry sort of person, you should practice enduring humiliation with patience. When your rival hits you with a banana cream pie, do what Charlie, Buster, and Harold would do, stay silent. This according to Maimonides is the strategy adopted by the virtuous men valorized in the ancient texts of Judaism. As he puts it, they would stay inside the line of the law, by erring on the ascetic side. This makes sense, since few of us need to train ourselves to seek enough food, sex, or wealth. Rather, almost all people tend to give in to pleasure, a point also made by Aristotle. The wise ancients, understanding this, steered a course towards asceticism, but without going too far from the moderate behavior that remained their ultimate goal. It may seem surprising that even prophets like Abraham would need to take such precautions, but Maimonides openly admits that the prophets were no paradigms of virtue. Solomon, for instance, had many wives, a sure sign that he was given to lust. When Abraham refused to look at his own wife's body, he was guarding himself against just such tendencies. Maimonides thus calls this tactic a precaution against vice, and says that people who adopt the tactic are displaying piety, in Hebrew hasidut. Sometimes ignorant people, seeing such pious acts, misunderstand the purpose of the exercise and become extreme ascetics. They may indulge in extreme fasting, wear unpleasant clothing, or withdraw from society to lead a life of isolation. Such ascetics go too far, by rejecting activities that are nowhere forbidden in the Torah. From this point, Maimonides is more or less in agreement with the earlier Bahya im Pakuda. It may not seem so, given that im Pakuda speaks rather favorably of asceticism in his work on the duties of the heart. But he strikes a note that would harmonize well with Maimonides, when he says that the purpose of ascetic practice is to establish soul's authority over the body. Given a choice between the life of an extreme ascetic, and that of a moderate person who errs on the ascetic side, im Pakuda too would give his approval to the second, more moderate approach. And perhaps we should expect that Maimonides and im Pakuda would have a similar understanding of virtuous action. After all, they are both trying to provide us with a theory that supports and explains the commandments of the law and the judgments found in the Mishnah and Talmud. Yet, already with im Daoud, and more decisively with Maimonides, we are seeing a major shift in the Jewish intellectual tradition. No longer will rational philosophy take the form of Neoplatonism, as in im Gavirol, or of pious exhortation, as in im Pakuda. Maimonides' embrace of Aristotle is going to be more divisive than these earlier developments, if only because Maimonides was, well, Maimonides, the greatest scholar of Jewish law in his age and the most powerful thinker to boot. Much as with Avicenna's impact on philosophy in the East, Maimonides' version of Aristotelianism will come to define philosophy for generations of later Jewish readers. It will also force them to take sides for or against philosophy, as Maimonides understood it. So, I heartily urge you to do your duty and join me as I look at Maimonides' life and ideas, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. I am not a Christian. I am a Christian. I am a Christian. I am a Christian. I am a Christian.