Salomon Maimon's Life; or, the History of the Imagining I

How might we read Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte as a work of philosophy in its own right? What would such a reading mean for the way we understand his thought? While the self-authored history of Maimon’s life has garnered much attention since being first published in 1792, it has been predominantly read as the mere story of a somewhat idiosyncratic philosopher striving towards wisdom and truth. By simply paying close attention to certain phrases employed within the book, and elucidating the philosophical significance accompanying them, this study offers a reading that breaks with this tradition. The pragmatic treatment of Maimon’s life history is interpreted as a philosophical act rooted in his own system of thought. Salomon Maimon’s life becomes the history of the supra-individual imagining I – or the world soul which grounds psychology as science – up to and including the invention of the very idea of such a universal being. This same idea can be discovered in the ten extended chapters of Lebensgeschichte dedicated to the writings of Maimon’s greatest teacher, Maimonides. And it is by bringing this to light that the study establishes the coherence these chapters share with the motley collection of psychological fragments surrounding them. In doing so, it discovers a continuity between Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte and his philosophical work at large in the concept of a free, pragmatic and productive imagination. Nicholas Lawrence is a philosopher at the School of Culture and Education at Södertörn University. Salomon Maimon’s Life is his doctoral thesis.