The perplexity in the Guide stems from confusion about the gaps, and sometimes contradictions, between two bodies of knowledge: Jewish tradition on the one hand and science and philosophy on the other. This is essentially a problem about reconciling two fundamentally different sources of knowledge: revelation and reason. Religious scriptures and traditions derive their authority from exceptional moments in which God revealed Himself to chosen individuals and communicated to them a body of doctrine and instruction. The knowledge that was thus conveyed was turned into a corpus of holy writings that was then accessible to people, including those of future generations, who had not experienced the revelation. Aristotelian philosophy, in contrast, sought to employ reason to answer the big questions about the world. Its insights were collected into books of thought, to which new insights were continually added over time, creating the body of knowledge that is philosophy. Someone who is seeking the ultimate source of authority must choose, in effect, between God and man.
On first impression, the goal of the Guide seems to be to resolve the tension between these two sources. Through innovative interpretations of biblical beliefs, the Rambam identified the core of philosophical truth that they contain. Moreover, throughout the book he elucidates the nature of revelation: it is not an alternative to reason as a source of knowledge about the world, he explains, but rather an achievement of reason itself. Turning revelation into the most elevated expression of reason collapses the barriers between two worlds of authority and overcomes the perplexity arising from the apparent tensions between them.
However, the deeper a reader swims in the Guide, the more he becomes aware of a new and more serious kind of perplexity—that which lies within reason itself. The writings of Aristotle, which some had thought to comprise the sum of all human wisdom, turned out not to contain exhaustive and reliable truth about reality after all. In particular, the field of astronomy, upon which metaphysics had been based, was shown to be seriously flawed. This undermined the whole intellectual structure that had been built on it.
In one of the pivotal sections of the Guide, the Rambam describes the intellectual quandary in which he found himself as a result of the collapse of the certainty of astronomy: “The extreme predilection that I have for investigating the truth is evidenced by the fact that I have explicitly stated and reported my perplexity regarding these matters” (Guide, 2:24). This puzzlement had an impact on many of the great questions of philosophy: What is the structure of the universe? Was the universe created, or has it existed forever? Is there a God? Is there life after death? All of these questions were subject to deep philosophical disagreements, arguments that demonstrated the inherent limits of reason. The perplexity of reason itself is the subject of this final section of the book.
The Guide is a masterpiece of careful and precise writing, and its goal is to lead the reader on a long and sometimes discomfiting journey. The reader is meant to arrive at the end of the book having acquired new understandings of human existence, including some that are likely to shake up his comfortable assumptions.
The Rambam laid out five approaches to providence, three possible positions with regard to prophecy, and three different ways of understanding creation. This diversity of opinions in the Guide has fostered lively disagreement over the centuries about what Maimonides really thought. There were some who understood him to be an Aristotelian philosopher, others who took him to be a mystic, and still others who thought he was a conservative traditionalist. The Guide, which presented so many arguments, itself became a focus of intense argument. Why did the Rambam obscure his real opinions? Surely not for the reason that the book of Job does. The Rambam claimed that there are fundamental theological questions inherent in the book of Job that had been obscured by the author, who did not wish the masses to know that basic issues of faith are subject to controversy:
Together with that notion, he [Elihu] says all that they have said . . . namely Job and his three friends . . . as I have mentioned to you, the notion expressed by another among them. This is done in order to hide the notion that is peculiar to the opinion of each individual, so that at first it occurs to the multitude that all the interlocutors are agreed on the selfsame opinion; however, this is not so. (Guide, 3:23)
But in the Guide, Maimonides has no qualms about revealing the existence of such disagreements. We can gain an inkling of why he does this from the Rambam’s halakhic work, the Mishneh Torah. Whereas the talmudic tradition is full of arguments about halakhic issues, the Mishneh Torah simply presented the final halakhic decisions shorn of the talmudic disputes that lay behind them. In a letter to Rabbi Pinchas the Judge, the Rambam explained that he omitted the underlying arguments because he wished to accord halakhah absolute authority. Arguments may awaken questions and doubts about the binding force of the halakhic norms and so weaken people’s commitment to keeping them. The Guide for the Perplexed, on the other hand, which explicitly sets out a range of different opinions and arguments, was written with the goal of undermining the reader’s absolute commitment to any one point of view.
Moreover, in a number of places the Rambam expresses conflicting views. He surely understood that these tensions would arouse doubts and questions as to the real doctrine of the Guide. It appears that this deliberate ambiguity was part of his purpose. But why? Generations of interpreters of the Guide concluded that that when the Rambam planted two inconsistent opinions in the text he actually believed one of them to be incorrect and placed it there in order to camouflage his true view. However, there is another possibility—that Maimonides himself was genuinely undecided about which of the two positions was correct.
In an important article, Yair Lorberbaum develops a striking insight.1 The conventional view is that this kind of contradiction appears in the Guide in order to conceal the Rambam’s true position by presenting a contradictory view as a sort of a smoke screen. Loeberbaum shows that this is not always the case. There are some instances of contradiction in the Guide where the Rambam identified himself completely with one of the two views. However, there are many other instances where he appears to make two contradictory claims. The Guide is the canvas upon which Maimonides worked out his own greatest philosophical dilemmas. He did not choose one position or the other, but rather inhabited the tension between them.
The struggles of interpreting the Guide are the struggles of the Guide itself. In the following chapters we will examine the contradictions of the Guide and see how the Rambam used them as a tool for presenting his own central dilemmas about the world, about God, and about humanity.