Abstract
The Guide of the Perplexed, as Maimonides announces in the introduction to the first part, is addressed to “one who has philosophized and has knowledge of the true sciences, but believes at the same time in the matters pertaining to the Law and is perplexed as to their meaning because of the uncertain terms and the parables” (6a). Such a person is bound to feel distress when he takes those biblical terms and parables in their “external meaning” and finds them in conflict with “the sciences of the philosophers” to which he has been drawn (3a). In that condition, he might feel compelled either to follow his intellect and renounce the foundations of the Law, or to turn his back on his intellect and be left with imaginary beliefs, based on the external meaning that is the source of this conflict. In offering guidance to such an individual, Maimonides pursues “the science of the Law in its true sense” (3a). The twofold purpose he specifies at the outset is to clarify certain equivocal, derivative, or amphibolous terms “occurring in books of prophecy” (3a), and to shed light on “very obscure parables occurring in the books of the prophets” (3b). These are, above all, the “secrets of the Torah” that the Talmudic Sages designated the Account of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot. The mystical teachings they found in the account of creation and in the prophetic visions of Ezekiel, which are not to be divulged without the greatest precaution, Maimonides proclaims to be identical with natural science and divine science (3b).
Theology cannot help but see in the philosophical life a persistent repetition and renewal of the Fall of Man…The choice of the philosophical life rests on an act of disobedience. Or as St. Bonaventure and the author of Der Antichrist have asserted in virtually the same words: philosophy itself appears to be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
—Heinrich Meier1
“It is a key permitting one to enter places the gates to which were locked. And when these gates are opened and these places are entered into, the souls will find rest therein, the eyes will be delighted, and the bodies will be eased of their toil and of their labor” [Maimonides, Introduction]. The Guide as a whole is not merely a key to a forest but is itself a forest, an enchanted forest, and hence also an enchanting forest: it is a delight to the eyes. For the tree of life is a delight to the eyes.
—Leo Strauss2
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Notes
Perhaps the biggest risk Maimonides takes, as the dedicatory letter to his absent pupil may imply, is teaching the divine science to the young. That is disapproved of, he explains, “because of the effervescence of their natures and of their minds being occupied with the flame of growth. When, however, this flame that gives rise to perplexity is extinguished, the young achieve tranquility and quiet” (I 34.40b): would that not be precisely when no guide of the perplexed is needful? The Athenian Stranger faces the same dilemma in Plato’s Laws (634d–e; cf. Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975 ], 11–21;
Benardete, Plato’s “Laws”: the Discovery of Being [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 6, 29–30).
The contrast with Averroes is striking. His “Decisive Treatise” begins with an argument that the Law makes philosophy not merely permissible but also obligatory, albeit only for the fitting; for those, however, whose commitment to the Law depends on imagistic language or rhetorical statements, questioning the apparent sense would be “a call to unbelief” (The Book of the Decisive Treatise Determining the Connection between the Law and Wisdom, trans. Charles Butterworth [Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2001], see especially sections 10–11, 42–47). Maimonides is far from denying a decisive division between the philosopher and the nonphilosopher; yet he insists on the need to correct certain “external meanings,” in order for true beliefs, in place of imaginary ones, to “be made clear and explained to everyone according to his capacity” (I 35,42b). On the role Maimonides finds for philosophy in affecting public belief, see Ralph Lerner, Maimonides’ Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), especially 3–13. Cf. Alfarabi’s description of the enterprise Plato undertakes in his Letters (“The Philosophy of Plato,” x. 38, trans. Muhsin Mahdi [Glencoe: The Free Press, 1962 ], 67).
The objector looks like one of “those who are outstanding among the men of knowledge,” most of whose thoughts, Maimonides claims, are preoccupied with the sense of touch, and they wonder why they do not become prophets (II 36,79b)! This reproach—in the midst of a sentence so long it is apparently grammatically incoherent (see note 5, 75b)—follows shortly after a misquotation in which Maimonides attributes to Aristotle a view about the disgracefulness of the sense of touch, which Aristotle ascribes to generally accepted opinion (Ethics 1118b2; cf. Strauss, “The Literary Character of the Guide of the Perplexed,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 75–76). If the misquotation by Maimonides—repeated on several occasions (II 40, 87a; III 8, 12b; III 49, 117a)—sends the reader back to the text of Aristotle, he would find a model of the philosopher examining generally accepted opinion, not endorsing it, and with that, perhaps, a clue to understanding the resentment of the body and call to asceticism that runs through the Guide. One might consider in this regard the body-hating philosophers of Plato’s Phaedo (see especially 66b–67b).
In Chapter 2 of Eight Chapters Maimonides assigns disobedience and obedience of the Law to two parts of the soul, the sentient—a claim that poses a problem in its own right—and the appetitive. Admitting that there is perplexity concerning the rational part, he grants that it may bring about obedience and disobedience through belief in a false or a true opinion; but there is no act in the rational part of the soul, he insists, to which “commandment” or “transgression” would apply (Ethical Writings of Maimonides, 64–65). “The sickness of the dialectical theologians” leads them to designate as “intellectual laws” what the philosophers recognize as generally accepted bad things (Ch. 6, 79–80). Cf. Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), especially 96–98.
Shlomo Pines, “Truth and Falsehood versus Good and Evil,” in Studies in Maimonides, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 145.
Shame is the law’s expression of man’s ignorance by way of prohibition. The law completes man by saying no to man. The law clothes man and thus turns philosophy—man’s awareness of his own ignorance—into shame” (Benardete, “Second Thoughts,” Herodotean Inquiries [South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999 ], 216).
Howard Kreisel, for instance, notes how striking it is that “not once in any of his writings does [Maimonides] mention the term ‘practical intellect’ or ‘practical rational faculty.’ Even when he clearly alludes to this faculty, he fails to mention it explicitly” (Maimonides’ Political Thought [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999], 63). Steven Berg reflects on the surprising absence of prudence among the virtues of the soul Maimonides lists in the second chapter of Eight Chapters, in sharp contrast with both Alfarabi and Aristotle: as Maimonides suggests through his silence, if prudence is “a source of right action wholly unrelated to law,” it cannot be acknowledged by the divine law, “which purports to be a comprehensive and exhaustive guide to right action” (“Maimonides on Piety and the Cure of the Soul: Eight Chapters 1–4, Interpretation 38, 2 [2011]: 125, 127). On the functions Maimonides assigns to practical reason or prudence, without directly referring to it, see the essay by Parens, “Prudence, Imagination, and Determination of Law in Alfarabi and Maimonides.”
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© 2013 Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax
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Burger, R. (2013). Maimonides on Knowledge of Good and Evil: The Guide of the Perplexed I 2. In: Pangle, T.L., Lomax, J.H. (eds) Political Philosophy Cross-Examined. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299635_7
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