A venerable tradition of Jewish philosophy preceded the Rambam. Jewish philosophy began with Philo of Alexandria and reawakened in the Middle Ages in the work of Isaac Israeli, Rabbi Sa’adiah Gaon, Rabbi Yehudah Halevi, and Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra. Each of these figures offered a body of systematic Jewish thought about major philosophical questions. Maimonides, however, did not view himself as part of this tradition. In the introduction to part 3 of the Guide, he wrote that in the distant past there had been a tradition of Jewish philosophy but that it had died out and no longer existed in his time:
This is the reason why the knowledge of this matter has ceased to exist in the religious community so that nothing great or small remains of it. And it had to happen like this, for this knowledge was only transmitted from one to another and has never been set down in writing.
Not only did Maimonides disclaim a connection with the tradition of medieval Jewish philosophy that preceded him, he denied its very existence. The Rambam did not call philosophy the thoughts of Rabbenu Bachya Ibn Pakuda, Yehudah Halevi, and Ibn Ezra. In matters of halakhah the Rambam viewed himself as an heir to the Sephardi halakhic tradition. In philosophy, on the other hand, he saw himself as an orphan.
Maimonides believed that the ancient philosophical knowledge that was once in the possession of the Jewish people had been lost but that it could be recovered through a careful and sensitive reading of the hints to that knowledge in the Bible and Rabbinic writings. However, the Rambam was at times sharply critical of the level of scientific and philosophical knowledge displayed by the sages of the Talmud. In his discussion of the doctrine of negative attributes, Maimonides cited a talmudic story and remarked that it was very insightful from a philosophical point of view. He added, however, the following comment: “You also know their famous dictum—would that all dicta were like it” (Guide, 1:59)—in other words, would that other talmudic sayings and stories displayed a similar philosophical acumen.
Throughout the Guide, the Rambam pointed out scientific and philosophical errors in the Talmud. He did not feel the need to reinterpret talmudic writings so that they would conform to scientific truth. Maimonides did not sacrifice his intellectual honesty for the sake of presenting the rabbis of the Talmud as profound scientists:1
There is the fact that I always hear from all those who had some smattering of the science of astronomy, that what the sages, may their memory be blessed, have said regarding distances was exaggerated. . . . Do not ask of me to show that everything they have said regarding astronomical matters conforms to the way things really are. For at that time, mathematics was imperfect. (Guide, 3:14)
That the Rambam did not identify with any extant Jewish scientific or philosophical tradition was no accident. Throughout the Guide he reflected on the weakness and inadequacy of human intellect, in part because of the tendency to give excessive respect to old and established ideas. The more venerable a view, the more reliable many took it to be. In his letter to the sages of Montpellier, he attacked astrology and those who believed in it, arguing that one reason for its wide acceptance was the influence of ancient astrological books: “It is a great and evil sickness that people think that if a thing is written in a book then it is true, and all the more so if the book is very old.”2 Old books can have a seductive aura that obscures our critical faculties. When the Rambam tried to explain why there was a Jewish magical tradition, he found that ancient books about magic were largely to blame:
Thereupon, these lies invented by the first wicked and ignorant man were written down and transmitted to good, pious and foolish men who lacked the scales by means of which they could know the true from the false. These people accordingly made a secret of these writings, and the latter were found in the belongings left behind them, so that they were thought to be correct. To sum it up, A fool believes everything (Prov. 14:15). (Guide, 1:62)
Those who subscribed to ancient, popular folk beliefs were the target of frequent criticism in the Guide. Their error consisted not just in believing in ideas simply because they were old and popular but also in extrapolating from what was supposedly widely known to areas that were less familiar. This kind of process leads to comparing God to man and the metaphysical realms with concrete, physical existence. In the most blatant form of this mistake, human physical characteristics are attributed to God. Those with more highly developed imaginations ascribe to God only human spiritual qualities, and those who were on a higher level yet managed to separate God from the realm of human attributes while still attempting to speak about Him using human language. It is very difficult for us to entirely transcend the physical plane of reality that we are accustomed to: “The multitude cannot at first conceive of any existence save that of a body alone; thus that which is not a body nor existent in a body does not exist in their opinion” (Guide, 1:26).
Those who fall into this error have two options: denial of God, or belief in a God who is physical:
For the multitude perceive nothing apart from bodies as having a firmly established existence and as being indubitably true, for anything that is not a body, but subsists in a body is existent; but its existence is more deficient than that of a body, as it requires a body in order to exist. That, however, which is neither a body nor in a body is not an existent thing in any respect, according to man’s initial representation, particularly from the point of view of the imagination. (Guide, 1:46)
According to popular belief, matter is the only thing that is deemed to exist. There is nothing existing that is not physical:
They thought that God has a man’s form, I mean his shape and configuration . . . and deemed that if they abandoned this belief . . . they would even make the deity nothing at all, unless they thought that God was a body provided with a face and a hand like them. (Guide, 1:1)
The need to give God a physical shape stems from mental attachment to concrete existence. Since people do not encounter beings without physical form in their day-to-day experience, they conclude that such beings cannot exist:
Now every such essence is of necessity endowed with attributes. For we do not ever find an essence of a body that while existing is divested of everything and is without an attribute. This imagination being pursued, it was thought that He, may He be exalted, is similarly composed of various notions, namely His essence, and the notions that are superadded to His essence. Several groups of people pursued the likening of God to other beings, and believed Him to be a body endowed with attributes. Another group raised themselves above this consequence and denied His being a body, but preserved His attributes. All this was rendered necessary by their keeping to the external sense of the revealed books. (Guide, 1:51)
Anthropomorphic representation of God is a consequence of copying familiar ways of thinking onto unfamiliar subjects. Just as people prefer to stick with food that they like rather than trying new things, and live in areas where they feel comfortable rather than venturing into unfamiliar neighborhoods, so people tend to remain in familiar furrows of thought rather than exploring new intellectual pastures.3 The Rambam challenged both individuals and communities on this issue. Just because a person has believed something for a long time does not mean that he needs to continue thinking it. Similarly, the fact that a culture has followed a certain course in the past does not mean that it must do so in the future. Reason can emancipate a man both from himself and from worn-out intellectual traditions.
However, even after freeing himself from limiting intellectual habits and traditions, was not the Rambam himself imprisoned by his commitment to a particular philosophical school, that is, the Greek tradition? We have seen him criticizing Jewish thought with tools from Aristotelian science and philosophy. Many have believed that while the Rambam used Aristotle to criticize, he did not criticize Aristotle. Aristotle was the yardstick the Rambam used to measure all other opinions, but Aristotle himself was not to be judged. Did Maimonides merely exchange one set of dogmatic opinions for another?
The Guide shows, however, that Maimonides did not regard the Aristotelian tradition as infallible. At the heart of the Rambam’s criticism of the Aristotelian tradition lay the accusation that the authoritarian style of this school as it had developed in the Middle Ages did not liberate thought but rather limited it.
Though I know that many men imbued with a partisan spirit will tax me because of this statement, either with having but little comprehension of their argument or with deliberately deviating from it, yet shall I not because of that, refrain from saying what I in my inadequacy have apprehended and understood. . . . Everything that Aristotle has said about all that exists from beneath the sphere of the moon to the center of the earth is indubitable correct, and no one will deviate from it unless he does not understand it or unless he has preconceived opinions that he wishes to defend or that lead him to a denial of a thing that is manifest. On the other hand, everything that Aristotle expounds with regard to the sphere of the moon and that which is above it is, excepting certain things, is something analogous to guessing and conjecturing. All the more does this apply to what he says about the order of the intellects, and to some of the opinions regarding the divine that he believes; for the latter contain grave incongruities and perversities that manifestly and clearly appear as such to all nations, that propagate evil, and that he cannot demonstrate. (Guide, 2:22)
The Rambam was describing the power of the Aristotelian consensus in the Middle Ages. Neo-Aristotelian zealots were blind to significant problems in Aristotle’s thought. According to the Rambam, we should judge a philosophical argument based on its content, rather on the name of the person who makes it. Aristotle’s prestige did not render his thought immune to error.
Indeed, the Rambam believed that Aristotle’s thought was full of errors. Aristotle’s God was described in terms of His positive attributes, whereas the dominant strand of the Guide ruled out any attempt to speak about God. Aristotle believed that there were separate intellects and that the heavenly spheres moved in perfect circles, whereas Maimonides saw that this was an inaccurate description of the universe. He believed that Aristotle’s cosmology only held true for the space below the sphere of the moon:
All that Aristotle states about that which is beneath the sphere of the moon is in accordance with reasoning; these are things that have a known cause, that follow one upon the other, and that, concerning which it is clear and manifest at what point wisdom and natural providence are effective, However, regarding all that is in the heavens, man grasps nothing but a small measure of what is mathematical. (Guide, 2:24)
Limiting the writ of Aristotelian doctrine to the lowest sphere of existence underlies the Rambam’s appeal to his readers to emancipate themselves from philosophical traditions. For him, the very idea of a philosophical tradition was an oxymoron; if thought is constrained by authority then it is not philosophy.
The Rambam contended that both religious thought and the Aristotelian philosophy of the Middle Ages fell into the trap of extrapolating from the familiar to the strange. He identified two illegitimate ways in which the Aristotelians did this:
1. The Rambam believed that the world above the sphere of the moon was not accessible to human reason, in contrast to what lies beneath the sphere of the moon, which may be understood. Maimonides assumed that the universe above the sphere of the moon was quite different from the terrestrial world. Aristotelians, on the other hand, derived inferences about the upper worlds from their conclusions about the lower world that we inhabit. They painted the universe in familiar colors, without taking into account the immense physical and cognitive distance that separates us from the stars.
2. As part of his strategy to sow doubt about Aristotelian proofs for the eternity of the world, the Rambam articulated the “Parable of the Island,” which questioned our ability to infer any reliable information about how an object came into being from what we observe about the object’s present existence. Looking at a person, for example, will not tell you anything about how babies come into the world. Similarly, reflecting on the world cannot teach us how it came to exist. Our inability to live with insoluble riddles drives us to extrapolate from what we know to areas where we have no experience.
Aristotelian philosophy, Maimonides believed, fell into the same traps as religious thought. Over time, philosophy turned into dogmatism and, instead of freeing man, imprisoned him in unproven and questionable beliefs. Maimonides was not an Aristotelian. Although he adopted many of Aristotle’s principles in the Guide, he was also harshly critical of Aristotelian dogmatism. Maimonides departed substantially both from the tradition of Jewish thought and also from Aristotelianism. He attempted to liberate the reader from the mistakes of both systems.
Often rebels eventually become authorities themselves. Did the Rambam attempt to emulate this pattern? Having undermined the major sources of authority in medieval philosophy, did he try to establish his own thought as a new source of intellectual authority?
No, he did not. In the Guide, the Rambam’s challenge to authority is directed as much at himself as toward other thinkers. He was open about his own perplexities and admitted that he knew no more about the universe above the sphere of the moon than the Neo-Aristotelians whom he attacked. The difference between him and them was that they thought that they knew, whereas Maimonides knew that he didn’t know. Maimonides wrote in his letters that the way to establish authority was to advance a clear and unequivocal system. That is what he accomplished so masterfully in the Mishneh Torah. But the Guide did not offer an orderly, systematic body of thought. Instead, it presented an apparently disorganized work open to multiple interpretations. Whether in the areas of creation, prophecy, providence, the commandments, or the nature of God, there was not one important claim made in the Guide that Maimonides did not also call into question by advancing a counterclaim. He offered thesis and antithesis, theory and then criticism of the theory. The Guide is an antiauthoritarian book, undermining even its own authority. Unlike the Mishneh Torah, in which the Rambam successfully propounded normative halakhah, the Guide leaves the reader without binding intellectual norms. Taking the two books together, the Rambam gave the reader certainty about how to act but a wide area of freedom regarding what to think.
By keeping his readers from treating tradition as an authoritative source of knowledge about the most exalted issues of philosophy, the Rambam made reason the primary authority in those matters. But here is the problem: Maimonides did not have great faith in reason either. True, he believed in it more than he believed in anything else as a reliable guide and tool in philosophy, but he saw it as limited. He thought that we could not know God, or the separate intellects, or the heavenly spheres. The Guide attacked claims to absolute authority made by philosophical traditions and at the same time undermined uncompromising faith in reason. It left its readers without firm theological ground beneath their feet.
This conclusion forces us to return to what is, in my view, the central question about the Guide: How can this book, which sets up knowledge as the goal of human life, also determine that we cannot know the great truths of existence? How could this thinker, who urged his students to acquire knowledge, also be so skeptical about our ability to know?
Human reason is bound to suffer bruising encounters with its own limits. Yet the goal of the Guide is not some kind of hopeless Sisyphean failure. The disappointment with philosophy’s failure to reach all of its aspirations is not the end of the journey. Rather, I would argue, Rambam saw this disappointment as a springboard to higher spiritual achievements.
The Rambam did not dictate to his readers the steps that might help them to move beyond perplexity. He suggested a number of paths that they might take, but he left it to his readers to choose among them. The end of the Guide is open. In the next two chapters I will discuss the paths that lead beyond perplexity.