critic as physician

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When I realised that this matter was a disease for the eyes, I set myself to gather herbs and choice spices from the books of the ancient pharmacists with which to concoct a medicine and an eye ointment for this disease. With God’s help, it will bring about a cure.

—Rambam, Maamar Kiddush Hashem

Around the middle of the 1100s, a fundamentalist sect of Islam attempted to force the Jews of North Africa to apostatise. The community faced a quandary: whether it was acceptable to falsely convert and still maintain any level of acceptable observance, essentially. A rabbi to whom a false convert posed the question had responded, unqualifiedly, no, you can’t be observant anymore. The false convert can no longer fulfil any of the mitzvos (commandments), as they’ll be accounted as sins. Rather than fulfilling as many mitzvos as he can, the false convert is just cosmically ruined. The Rambam, otherwise known as Maimonides, thought this is a terrible answer and gives much better reasoning in his famous responsum, known as the Maamar Kiddush Hashem. I won’t go through all the points he uses to refute the loser rabbi who’d falsely answered before him, but suffice it to say, as someone whose heart is with all crypto-Jews and their descendants, I agree with the Rambam here, and find his responsum emotionally uplifting.

In particular, the passage above was quite poignant to me. The Rambam was a physician, and he frames the issue at hand as medicinal. The other rabbi provided a disease; the Rambam would concoct a cure from the ancient texts, in judicious doses, to try to cure the ailment.

Statue of the Rambam in Spain

I love this framing and relate to it — hard. In this passage alone, the Rambam lays out a few morsels that I felt were wise and relevant to today’s discursive diseases. Firstly, he recognises the hurt caused by the other rabbi’s stupidity. Not only was the other rabbi wrong on the facts, he also created pain for this community. Secondly, the Rambam recognises that the holy ancient sources used rightly are medicinal. Thirdly, in accordance with the first point, the Rambam recognises that a rebuttal to a disgusting and vicious argument is not just an intellectual dunk, but an effort of healing.

I think it’s easy enough to see the first of these points—the experience of consuming too much intellectually insulting material does feel akin to sickness—and more people are reaching the second point, albeit sometimes taking that realisation in the wrong direction and concluding all of faith is therapy. The third point, though, is the tricky one. Being a critical healer is hard.

I’ve written before, and will always happily write again, that critics need to build, not just tear down. The tearing down is the easy part. Girl Yelling At Wall Magazine put out a great newsletter on hating the other day, arguing that being a “hater” can be fun and make a critic popular, and that it can give the illusion of intellectualism, but that it can lead to poor thinking. Yes, she is aware, excessive optimism can be annoying, but haterade is not the solution in every instance. Here is where her argument is most pertinent to my topic today:

I guess I think Hating is often not conducive to critical engagement. Self proclaimed Haters take pride in their “critical thinking skills,” but I think it’s more impressive when someone is able to critically think about art in a positive way.

I’ve also noted before that it’s harder to make positive arguments—arguments that assert something, that build something—than negative arguments, arguments that pick apart others’ work. Go to a freshman philosophy course and see what I mean. Nevertheless, the critic needs to be a healer, not just a hater.

My goal in writing needs to be to bring the world back together, not to tear it down further. My criticism needs to be aimed carefully, very carefully, and my reconstruction should consume a hundredfold more of my time and energy than my negativity.

The Prophets are a good model of this, offering withering criticism but hope, too. And the hope is harder to hold onto than the fear and the fury. Bitterness is good in its due dosage—it’s “the type of feeling bad that spurs a person towards positive activity”—but it can’t be everything. It isn’t the end and won’t be there at the end; everything will become sweetness, in the end, or so I believe. I don’t want this to become too confessional of a rant, though; I think the ideas in the Rambam’s words above are secularly useful too!

The idea of using ancient texts as medicine is so real to me, and not just in the case of biblical or Jewish-traditional texts. Finally reading Juvenal and seeing how humans two millennia ago felt and dealt with much the same things as we do now has been deeply therapeutic for me of late. A lifetime of studying the ancient Greek canon has provided much the same comfort. We’re all in this together, to put it tritely; not just us, but those 2,500 years ago who had the same soul-capacities, too. I know I dump on Marcus Aurelius a lot (or rather on people who think he provides the entire expression of Stoic thought), but I’m also aware that a lot of people find solace in his words, and they are often not half bad. There’s nothing wrong with that. These are healing words: the Bible, the Stoics, yes even Plotinus, whom I in many ways dislike. A Plotinus quote, to bring us back to the Rambam’s image of an ocular disease:

Out of discussion we call to vision: to those desiring to see, we point the path; our teaching is of the road and the travelling; the seeing must be the very act of one that has made this choice.

The true physician-critic knows that how we see can be warped by what we read or experience. Plotinus knows that the goal of his teaching must be to orient our experience by healing our vision. Good artists are also aware of how our vision (or worldly experiences — I’m not literally just referring to eyes here) is shaped by what we’re going through.

To be clear, neither the Rambam nor I, nor Plotinus for that matter, is claiming that critics should stick to writing overtly uplifting things about puppies and kittens and how everything will be okay. Rather, good criticism provides a sharp tool that lances the infected outgrowths of discourse, but then provides the bandage for the wound it leaves behind. The Rambam demolishes the rabbi’s false claims, but then he turns around constantly to offer scriptural truth instead. Lancing, healing. He sees intellectual problems and eliminates them; he sees the wounds those problems have left and heals them. That’s the point of recognising that the other rabbi left behind a disease. Unfortunately most of us are not great polymaths like the Rambam, but at least he left us a good model for how to be a physician-critic.

Translation credit for the Maamar Kiddush Hashem: Avraham Yaakov Finkel; for Plotinus’s Enneads: Stephen MacKenna (old but elegant).

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