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1 2 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 38 / Issue 2
The analogies between soul and body and between physician
and healer of souls break down in light of the fact that whereas the body has
parts, the soul strictly speaking does not. Because of the part–whole character
of the body, it is possible for the physician to specialize and for him to
cure the eye of glaucoma while leaving the ulcer in the stomach untreated.
No such specialization is possible, it would seem, in the art of the physician of
the soul insofar as “the soul of man is a single soul” (61). To speak of separate
parts or powers in relation to soul is a mere convenience. In fact all of these
are various actions of something that is essentially one. If the soul is one,
however, then the knowledge of the soul possessed by the soul doctor is of the
soul entire. The soul doctor must possess knowledge of the human soul, its
structure, and its unity. He must possess self-knowledge. It is no wonder that
Maimonides declares that “wise men…are the physicians of the soul” (66).
When Maimonides himself goes on, however, to speak of the various parts
of the soul, it becomes difficult for the reader to construe precisely how these
various and seemingly perfectly distinct actions could belong to an entity
that is somehow one in a much more complete way than the organic whole of
the living body. What is the principle of unity of the soul that combines all of
these disparate actions into one?
Maimonides’s account of the “powers” of the soul is taken
from Aristotle via Alfarabi: they are five in number—nutritive, sentient,
imaginative, appetitive, and rational (61). Maimonides adds a remark in this
regard, however, that is found neither in Alfarabi’s Aphorisms nor in Aristotle’s
Ethics and De Anima, namely, that when one applies such terms to souls
differing in species one uses them in an equivocal sense. For example, the
nutritive part of the soul of a donkey or a horse is the same in name only with
the nutritive part of the soul of a human being (61–62). Why this is so is not
immediately clear. The analogy that Maimonides employs to illustrate the
specific differences in regard to sensation in the case of a man’s soul and in
that of a donkey or an eagle is, however, revealing. We call by a single name,
he says, the light illuminating three dark places. Yet the source of light in
one case is the sun, in another the moon, in another a lamp. This example
is drawn from Ibn Bajja’s Conjunction of the Intellect with Man (McGinnis
and Reisman 2007, 279–80; see also Strauss 1995, 126–27) and finds its ultimate
source in Plato’s so-called allegory of the cave. Ibn Bajja follows Plato in
deploying the distinction between artificial light casting shadows in a cave,
the light from a reflective body, and the light of the sun illuminating the visible
things in the world beyond the cave as an analogy for the distinction
between three modes of apprehension, all of which are human in the broad