From the dawn of philosophy there have been thinkers who have maintained that knowledge is redemptive. The Rambam, I would argue, believed that knowing the limits of our knowledge is what redeems. He did not place this idea at the end of the Guide as a kind of final and definitive resolution of perplexity, but rather alluded it throughout his writings. It is this therapeutic role of intellectual perplexity that makes the Guide especially relevant to skeptical, questioning readers today.
For the Rambam, the ultimate spiritual goals to which we aspire include not just original thoughts but also new feelings. The highest religious experiences are marked by an outpouring of two lofty emotions: love and awe. Attaining these feelings is a positive commandment:
It is a positive commandment to love and fear the honored and awesome God, as it says, you shall love the Lord your God and you shall fear God. (MT, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, 2:2)
The Rambam was well aware of the absurdity of presuming to command emotions. Our feelings are mostly involuntary. We cannot turn them on or off at will. If we could, then the world would be a far less romantic place. The drama of countless novels, movies, and plays flows from the fact that love is not subject to human decision. How, then, can it be commanded?
Although we cannot activate these emotions directly, we can arouse them indirectly. By way of analogy, I cannot will my heart to beat faster, but I can choose to engage in vigorous exercise that will result in my pulse rate rising. Similarly, the Rambam believed that while we cannot spontaneously engender love, we may cultivate habits that will give rise to feelings of love:
What is the way to love and fear Him? When a person meditates on God’s wondrous actions and creations, and sees His infinite, unfathomable wisdom, he will immediately love, praise and glorify Him and with a great desire will yearn to know God’s great name, as David said, My soul thirsts for God, the living God (Ps. 42:3). (MT, Hilkhot Yesodei Ha-Torah, 2:2)
Profound study of nature and the cosmos can bring us to a powerful sense of amazement at the vastness of the universe and the astonishing wisdom that is contained in it. It is not that this sense of wonder brings us to love of God; it is the essence of love of God. Maimonides reinterpreted the most elemental religious feelings. Love of God is the emotion that resonates throughout a person’s being when he encounters nature. And this feeling awakens another emotion that is no less intense—awe of God:
When he thinks about those things, he will immediately be afraid and will know that he is a small, lowly creature made of dust and that his intellect is slight compared to the Pure of Knowledge, as David said, When I behold Your heavens . . . what is man that you have been mindful of Him? (Ps. 8:4–5). (MT, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, 2:2)
Being aware of the vastness of the universe gives rise to a sense of our smallness, of humility. A person should be aware of how tiny, marginal, and utterly insignificant he is in the face of the immensity of the cosmos. It is not that this awareness brings us to awe of God; it is the essence of awe of God. This is a paradoxical kind of religious experience that simultaneously elicits contrasting emotions. The more a person studies science, the more these feelings are aroused and deepened. As Maimonides put it in the Guide, “love is proportional to the level of our understanding” (3:51).
People speak of “intellectual types” and “emotional types.” These cultural understandings reflect a current in Western thought which holds that in order to achieve a profound, emotional grasp of reality we need to abandon reason and strive for a state of “mystical simplicity.”1 Another common perception is that an active rational, intellectual life creates people who are desiccated and cut off from their emotions. A Bratslaver Hassid once told me that he could always tell people who studied the Guide. Most of them, he said, were pale and lifeless.
This halakhah from the Mishneh Torah breaks down such artificial distinctions between feeling and intellect. The Rambam thought that the strongest emotional experiences arise from profound study. The scientist and the philosopher are not cut off from emotion. Powerful feelings of love and awe burn within them.
It is interesting to note that these twin emotions emerging from scientific study are described in a remarkably similar way by one of the greatest modern scientists, Albert Einstein. In his book The World as I See It, Einstein described the religious sensibility of great scientists:
The scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.2
The amazement that the Rambam describes at the wisdom of creation that is strikingly akin to Einstein’s astonishment at “the harmony of natural law.” Similarly, Einstein echoes Maimonides’s sense of man’s smallness and insignificance: “One who understands this will know that all man’s wisdom and intellect are no more than a dim, insignificant flickering.”3
However, further investigation of the Rambam’s view shows that words like “wonder” and “smallness” do not fully capture his understanding of the complex religious emotions of love and awe.
He will love, praise and glorify Him and with a great desire will yearn to know God’s great name. (MT, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, 2:2)
Enfolded within the experience of wonder is a great desire for knowledge. Love of God is not only an outcome of knowledge. It also arouses a thirst for additional knowledge. But what kind of knowledge awakens such a powerful yearning?
A related question flows from the way in which the Rambam described fear of God:
He will immediately be afraid and will know that he is a small, lowly creature made of dust and that his intellect is slight compared to the Pure of Knowledge. (MT, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, 2:2)
According to the Aristotelian concept that the Rambam adopted, there is no gap between a person and the objects of his understanding.4 In this view, knowledge is something that enlarges us as we absorb new ideas. However, in the passage above the Rambam describes the experience of knowledge as one that leads to a sense of smallness (“he will know that he is a small, lowly creature”). What kind of learning causes us to feel so small?
These two questions share a single, surprising answer that is hinted to at the end of this halakhah: “his intellect is slight compared to the Pure of Knowledge.” This is not an experience of physical smallness, but rather of intellectual insignificance. A person feels intellectual smallness when he does not understand. This halakhah, I propose, describes an experience of not understanding. When a person experiences this sense of wonder in the face of a universe that is infinitely greater than his capacity to grasp, he feels the immensity of this gap, and then he understands that he does understand. This is a kind of knowledge that does not quench the thirst for knowledge but arouses a desire for more.
Love and awe arise not just from our understanding of the world, but also from the failures of our understanding to grasp more than we do. The intellectual perplexity that results from reading the Guide, which leads some to pursue ecstatic mysticism and others to a life of social action, brings all its serious students to love and awe of God. One who sets out to know God will inevitably come up against the limits of reason. When he meets a metaphysical brick wall that intellect cannot breach, he confronts the limits of his humanity and realizes his smallness in the face of the immensity of the cosmos. This evokes love and awe.
Perplexity leads us to a sense that the world exceeds our understanding. You might compare it to two men who have spent their whole life on a deserted island standing on the seashore and gazing off into the distance. One of them believes that human powers of vision are unlimited and assumes that the place beyond which he cannot see is actually the end of the world. The other, more modest, understands that the visible horizon may not be the end of the world, that reality might extend further than he can see.
Similarly, a certain kind of rationalist believes that the limits of understanding mark the limits of the universe. In the Guide, Maimonides attempts to free his readers from such a notion. Beyond our senses, intellect, and imagination, there are planes of existence that we cannot grasp. Encountering the limits of reason engenders a sense of mystery.
There are two kinds of thought that cannot reconcile themselves with this notion that there may be whole areas of existence beyond what we know: folk theology and atheism. Folk theology maintains that there is a God but that He is part of the world that we ordinarily know. Atheism, on the other hand, asserts that there is no God, that there is only the world that we know. Both of these approaches shrink reality to fit the bounds of what is knowable. Maimonides, by contrast, asserted that God exists but that we cannot know God. He posited a world beyond what we can grasp that is not accessible to human intellect.
The encounter with the borders of reason is the key to Maimonides’s therapeutic philosophy: there is something profoundly healing about recognizing our intellectual limits; it undermines self-centeredness.
The belief that we are at the center of the world is responsible for many of our psychological, political, and theological problems. Maimonides’s understanding of the problem of evil, as we saw in part 1, was that it stemmed from the widespread but mistaken human assumption that the world exists to serve us. But the world does not work like that, and the dissonance between our expectations and reality leads to regular frustration and despair. Freedom from this self-centered attitude can lead to a healthier awareness that the world is not designed to meet our every need or want and that many outcomes that we had previously called “evil” were the result of our own unrealistic expectations.
The traditional belief in providence posits that God watches over the life of every human being. For the believer, God redeems each of us from our cosmic loneliness and gives us a sense of absolute self-worth. The Rambam, as we saw, reframed the concept of providence; providence is not God’s constant interest in every person, but rather a spiritual achievement of one who seeks God. Similarly, he reconceived prophecy so that it was no longer a result of God’s deciding to be involved in human life, but primarily an initiative of human beings who decide to live their whole life as an endeavor to come closer to God. Throughout the Guide, God, not man, is placed at the center.
The Guide for the Perplexed is a redemptive book. It belongs to an ancient tradition that affirmed the existence of a body of knowledge, the understanding and internalization of which can liberate us from the pains and sorrows of the world. However, unlike Gnosticism, Epicureanism, Spinozism, and certain schools of Kabbalah, for the Rambam the most liberating knowledge is the knowledge that we do not know.
The Guide informs us that it does not communicate its teachings fully. It gives us the chapter headings and leaves its readers to understand the rest of the message from their own intellectual resources. The reader becomes a partner in the construction of the book. The Rambam called on his readers not just to understand what he had written but also to uncover meanings that were not explicitly stated. A reader is invited to not only interpret the Guide but also to continue and extend its teaching based on his sense of the hidden, internal logic of the book. Therefore, any extensive reading of the Guide has an element of midrash to it. This chapter is my midrash on the Guide, which says, in essence, that the goal of knowledge is to encounter the limits of knowledge. The full realization of this intellectual project will bring us to a life of awe and wonder in which we are aware that there is mystery at the heart of the world, making us no longer able to see ourselves as the center or purpose of creation.5
The Western cultural and philosophical climate of the second half of the twentieth century was, in general, characterized by radical skepticism. Man lost faith in his ability to make objective ethical judgments or to advance universally valid scientific theories. Objective truth no longer existed; there were only narratives. There were many versions of this attitude, which is often referred to as postmodernism. Some saw the assertion that a statement is objectively true as an attempt to achieve power and control. Others viewed “truth” as no more than a compliment that was paid to dignify certain opinions. For others, the word “truth” expressed nothing except the advantage gained by using the word. The second half of the twentieth century was indeed an era of perplexity.
The Rambam would have understood the sense that it is difficult to reach the truth. For him though, the encounter with the limits of reason did not engender frustration, cynicism, and despair, but rather awakened love and awe. The Guide’s profound treatment of fundamental questions in Jewish philosophy made the Rambam a seminal teacher for many generations of students. However, it is the central issue of the book—the challenge of living with perplexity—that makes the book especially relevant in the postmodern era.
The Rambam’s perfect man was not one who reached certainty, but rather one who could, without self-deception, distinguish between proofs that were compelling and proofs that were almost, but not entirely, compelling:
For if you stay your progress because of a dubious point; if you do not deceive yourself into believing that there is a demonstration with regard to matters that have not been demonstrated; if you do not hasten to reject and to categorically pronounce false any assertions whose contraries have not been demonstrated; if finally you do not aspire to apprehend that which you are not able to apprehend—you will have reached human perfection. (Guide, 1:32)6
Let us go back to the parable of the palace, in which the Rambam depicted the spiritual hero at advanced stages on the path to perfection. The hero is described as almost—but not quite—reaching certainty:
He, however, who has achieved demonstration to the extent that it is possible, of everything that may be demonstrated; and who has ascertained in divine matters to the extent that that is possible, everything that may be ascertained; and who has come close to certainty in those matters in which one can only come close to it—has come to be with the ruler in the inner part of his habitation. (Guide, 3:51)7
The Rambam’s hero lives with the knowledge of being close to the truth, but without jumping to precipitous conclusions. The Guide itself is an example of philosophy done in this spirit. We have seen how the Rambam asserted certain positions, for example, on the creation of the world, not because they were irrefutably proven to be true but because the balance of probabilities was in their favor.
The driving quest of philosophy, from Plato through Descartes and into the modern era, was for absolute certainty. However, the greater the ambition, the more easily it could be undermined, and the more painful was its eventual disappointment. One small doubt was enough to destroy a proof that claimed to be absolute. The modern history of ideas is a progression from seeking complete certainty to surrendering to total skepticism, from the philosophers’ claim that they had found the truth to the postmodernist claim that there is no truth. The seeds of radical skepticism may be found in the radical certainty that philosophy sought throughout the ages. If your faith depends on absolute certainty, then its absence will destroy your faith absolutely.
The radical skepticism that has become the received wisdom in our era of perplexity is not entirely new. In ancient Greece there were already thinkers such as Protagoras and Pyrrho who espoused similar notions. Postmodernism is a new version of old ideas; its novelty is cultural rather than philosophical. An idea that used to be on the periphery of the intellectual conversation became central—not because stronger philosophical arguments for skepticism were discovered, but because of the terrible history of the last century.
The twentieth century was the culmination of modernism. Ideas that were born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evolved into extreme ideologies, and the results were Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinist communism. In the first half of the twentieth century, humanity fell victim to absolute certainties. As Karl Popper put it, “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” From Auschwitz to the Siberian gulags, the grotesque failures of modernity were clear. This was a story of people who, with total certainty about what was good, ended up doing an immense amount of evil.
Postmodernism in philosophy was a reaction to the atrocities of the twentieth century. Certainty about good and evil gave way to skepticism about the concepts of good and evil themselves. Vaulting ideologies that tried to encompass everything were traded in for modest narratives that were content to explain just a little. Anyone who speaks of certainty today is suspect. The Western world has turned to skepticism in the hope that this will save us from a repetition of the twentieth century’s catastrophes. Postmodernism is above all post-trauma.
However, there is a high price to pay for radical skepticism. It shackles the curiosity of humankind. If there is no truth, then there is no point in seeking it. Reading ancient books, studying diverse religions, and learning about profound philosophies is motivated by an urge to find the truth. If truth were to disappear there is a danger that the search would also. In practice, there are two extremes that snuff out the desire for knowledge: dogmatism and radical skepticism. Dogmatism asserts that the search is unnecessary because we already have the truth. Radical skepticism says the search is pointless because there is no truth.
Two conditions, then, are necessary for a real philosophical conversation: belief that there is truth, and an absence of certainty about it. The Rambam tried to create a new intellectual archetype: the man whose beliefs did not depend on absolute knowledge, who was prepared to live without self-deception by ideas that fell short of certainty. By releasing us from the need for certainty, the Rambam also shielded us from radical doubt. It is this possibility which, after the failures of modernism and postmodernism, makes The Guide for the Perplexed more relevant today than ever.