WorkMaimonides

Eight Chapters on Ethics

Aristotle's ethics retold for readers of the Mishnah, taken from philosophers Maimonides admits using but declines to name.

by Maimonides62 passages held

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Original title: Shemonah Perakim
Original language: Arabic

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Overview

At the head of these chapters Maimonides admits that none of their ideas are his own: he has gathered them from the rabbis and from philosophers ancient and recent, because truth should be accepted from whatever source it comes, and he will not name those philosophers, since a reader without insight might reject a sound idea because of its author. In 1963 Herbert Davidson, a historian of medieval philosophy, showed how much of the borrowing came from one book, the Aphorisms of the Statesman by al-Farabi, the tenth-century Muslim philosopher. The chapters form the introduction to Maimonides' commentary on Avot, the tractate of the Mishnah that collects the sages' moral sayings, and so belong to the Commentary on the Mishnah he completed in Egypt in 1168, written in Judaeo-Arabic. Samuel ibn Tibbon put them into Hebrew, and they became known by their Hebrew name, Shemonah Perakim. Their case is that the commandments and Aristotle's ethics teach one thing. A good character is a mean between two extremes, as generosity lies between meanness and extravagance; a soul that leans to one side is sick and needs the sages as its physicians. When pious men of old fasted and went into the wilderness, they were treating their own souls; the ignorant who copied them by punishing their own bodies had mistaken the medicine for health. The last chapter sets out human freedom against the astrologers, who said that a person's virtue or vice is fixed by the stars at birth.

Key concepts

What is the mean in the Eight Chapters?

It is the right point between two faults, one of too much and one of too little. Generosity is the mean between meanness and extravagance, courage between recklessness and cowardice, humility between arrogance and self-abasement. Maimonides takes the idea from the philosophers and claims it for the Law: a good deed is one done from such a balanced disposition, and the commandments exist to keep people there.

Does Maimonides think a person has several souls?

No. He holds that the soul is one, with five faculties: the nutritive power that feeds and grows the body, the senses, the imagination, the appetite that desires and shrinks back, and reason. The physicians of his day spoke of three souls; he answers that these are only different activities of one soul. Good and bad traits of character belong mainly to the senses and the appetite.

What is the difference between moral and intellectual virtues?

Moral virtues are good habits of desire and feeling, such as generosity, courage or modesty, and they are acquired by repeated practice. Intellectual virtues belong to reason: wisdom, which knows the causes of things, and quickness of understanding. Maimonides reads a verse of the prophet Zechariah, “love truth and peace”, as naming both: truth for the virtues of the mind, peace for the virtues of character.

What goal do all the virtues serve in this book?

Knowing God, as far as a human being can. Maimonides wants every activity, eating, sleeping, work, even rest and pleasure, directed to that one end, so that health serves clear thinking and clear thinking serves knowledge of God. Seeking pleasure for its own sake or health for its own sake both miss the point. The sages' saying “let all your deeds be for the sake of God” sums it up.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Physicians of the Soul

What does it mean for a character, rather than a body, to be ill, and who can heal it? The answer Maimonides gives turns ethics into a kind of medicine and the sages into its doctors.

Good character, for Maimonides, lies in the mean between two extremes: generosity between meanness and extravagance, courage between recklessness and cowardice. A soul that leans to one side is sick, and like a sick body it tastes sweet as bitter and wants what harms it. The cure is to push it for a while towards the opposite extreme until it settles in the middle. Pious men of old who fasted were doing exactly that, treating themselves; those who copied them in health mistook the medicine for the goal, which is a balanced life aimed at knowing God.

virtue ethics
mean
moderation
moral psychology
moral education
desire
habituation
asceticism
virtue
soul
faculties

Enter a dialogue

Freedom Against the Stars

If the stars, or God, settled at our birth whether we would be good or wicked, could anyone be blamed for anything? Maimonides closes the book by defending a freedom on which the whole Law depends.

Against the astrologers, who held that the constellation at birth fixes a person's virtue or vice, Maimonides argues that nobody is born good or bad. A body may lean one way, a warm-blooded man towards bravery, a cold-hearted one towards fear, but training decides what becomes of the leaning. Were it otherwise, commands, warnings, rewards and punishments would all be unjust and pointless. He then faces the hard verse in which God hardens Pharaoh's heart, and reads it as a punishment that came after Pharaoh had already freely chosen cruelty.

free will
moral responsibility
divine punishment
divine justice
human nature
repentance

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 62
distinct concepts: 109
by passages held, corpus-wide: #615

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “free will” and “moral responsibility”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 69 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
free will	moral responsibility	10
divine punishment	free will	6
desire	moral psychology	5
moral education	virtue ethics	5
moral psychology	virtue ethics	5
desire	virtue ethics	4
divine punishment	moral responsibility	2
free will	virtue ethics	2
moral education	prophecy	2
free will	moral education	1
free will	prophecy	1
moral education	moral psychology	1
moral education	moral responsibility	1
moral psychology	prophecy	1
moral responsibility	prophecy	1
moral responsibility	virtue ethics	1
prophecy	virtue ethics	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

Commentary on the Mishnah: Tractate Sanhedrin (Kitāb al-Sirāj: Sanhedrin)
One tractate of Maimonides' first great book, the Commentary on the Mishnah, including the introduction to Perek Helek in which the Thirteen Principles first appear; held in the medieval Hebrew translation printed in the Vilna Talmud.
HE
Eight Chapters on Ethics (Shemonah Perakim) you are here EN
Mishneh Torah: Foundations of the Torah (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah)
Where the Mishneh Torah begins: Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah, the opening section of its first book, the Book of Knowledge (Sefer ha-Madda); held alone, its ten chapters in Simon Glazer's English of 1927.
EN
Mishneh Torah: Human Dispositions (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot De'ot)
The second of the five sections of the Book of Knowledge, between the Foundations of the Torah and the laws of Torah study; held alone, its seven chapters in Simon Glazer's English of 1927.
EN
Mishneh Torah: Repentance (Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Teshuvah)
Closing the Mishneh Torah's first book, the Book of Knowledge, Hilkhot Teshuvah is the last of its five sections; held alone, its ten chapters in Simon Glazer's English of 1927.
EN
The Commentary to Mishnah Aboth (Kitāb al-Sirāj: Avot)
Maimonides' commentary on the five chapters of Avot, written within the Commentary on the Mishnah and opened by the Eight Chapters, which have their own page here; held in Samuel ibn Tibbon's medieval Hebrew.
HE
The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn)
Maimonides' last major book, addressed to a single reader and completed in Fustat around 1190, a decade after the Mishneh Torah had made his name. Held here in Michael Friedländer's English of 1904, with the letter to Joseph.
EN
Treatise on Logic (Maqāla fī ṣināʿat al-manṭiq)
Traditionally the earliest of Maimonides' writings; held in Moses ibn Tibbon's Hebrew, all fourteen chapters, from a Warsaw printing of 1928.
HE

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