Continuation. Counter-Reasons. A Psychological Explanation of Prophesy That Doesn’t Undermine the Dignity of Prophesy
NEXT MAIMONIDES SHOWS that even Aristotle himself (who was in the best position to evaluate his own methods of proof, having established the theory of proof) presents these proofs [of the eternity of the world] as being less than unshakeable demonstrations, something that comes to light through many passages in his works. In the following passages,1 Maimonides tries (without violating the laws of logic in the least) to undermine these proofs insofar as this is possible.
Using a single conspicuous idea, he at first tries to overturn those proofs taken from the nature of the world as such. [95]
The nature of each thing that has developed to full actuality (he says2) is different from what its nature was when it had only a tendency to actuality, and this in turn is different from the nature of the same thing when it resided only in potentiality. And so, one cannot draw conclusions about the one condition based on the other. If one neglects this remark, one will necessarily wind up with unresolvable difficulties and inconsistent assertions. Let us imagine a person born in the desert with perfect natural capacities. His mother died after nursing him for only a few months; his father took over his upbringing, seeing it through in lonely circumstances. This person, who has never encountered a woman or any feminine animal, therefore asks his father: How did we come to be? What is the efficient cause of our existence? And how did we come into the world ? The father, as is only natural, gives him an account. Each of us, he says, is conceived in the womb of someone of our kind, namely, a woman of such [96] and such constitution. At first, we are all tiny in our mother’s womb, but we grow over time until we reach a certain size, at which point an exit from our captivity opens up, and we continue to live and to grow. When the son proceeds to ask whether we eat, drink, breathe, and excrete waste in our mother’s womb (since we live), and his father denies all this, he will seek to counter his father in the following way. Every one of us, he will say, who has for a short time lost the capacity to breathe, will necessarily die. So, how could someone live for nine months without breathing in his mother’s body? How could he nourish himself without using his mouth, etc.? For these reasons, he will come to regard the entire fact as false and believe that people cannot come to be in such a way.
It is just the same with respect to our views about Aristotle. Leaning on the testimony of revealed religion, [97] we believe that the world came into being in such and such a way and with such and such an order. Proceeding from the nature of the actual world, Aristotle tries to refute our belief. We can concede that everything he builds upon is a fact, only we assert that one cannot extrapolate from the nature of the actual world to conclusions about its nature before it had reached full actuality. What will Aristotle do to counter our position? Nothing!
With this, I have built a strong wall around (revealed) religion, one wall that can repel all the arrows aimed at it.
If, however, Aristotle goes on to ask, if one cannot proceed from the nature of the actual world to conclusions about its nature before it had achieved full actuality, how can one prove the world was created from nothing, we will reply: That is not at all our intention. We merely want to show that this question cannot be determined through recourse to the nature of the world. The genesis of the world from nothing is [98] at the very least problematically possible, and it is simply this that we wanted to show.3
(The intelligent reader not unfamiliar with modern philosophy will find similarities between Maimonides’ critique of Aristotle and Kant’s critique of the dogmatists. Kant, namely, shows that the dogmatists have no justification for drawing conclusions about the nature of the world as a thing-in-itself from the nature of the world as an appearance. And, similarly, Maimonides shows that Aristotle has no justification for drawing conclusions about the world’s previous nature from the nature of the fully formed world.)4—
Next Maimonides tries to undermine those reasons for the eternity of the world that are derived from God’s Being.5
1 If one says: God, as the most perfect Being, cannot have mere potentiality, but rather everything that is in His capacity must constantly be actual. Thus, if God created the world from nothing at a particular time, [99] then that which had been in him merely as a potential (for creating the world) became actual. The actualization of the world must therefore have a ground external to God. And if this in turn is so, He cannot be the most perfect Being. But it is very easy to overcome such a doubt. A being that consists of matter and form only actualizes the potential of its form. Before it attains this form, it merely has a potentiality, which becomes actual (through the form). By contrast, an immaterial being has within itself the ground for its effects. From this it doesn’t follow that the being would produce effects at one time but not at others, and that consequently a change occurs in it, as a mere potentiality attains actuality. The active intellect (universal world spirit), which, according to Aristotle and his followers, is non-material, doesn’t always produce effects but rather does so at certain times; yet one can hardly say about it that for this reason it undergoes change. For material and the non-material [100] beings have no similarities when it comes to producing effects.
But, one will say, this solution is sheer sophistry. The reason why the active intellect doesn’t always produce effects lies in the preparation of matter (its receptivity for this effect). But this reason doesn’t apply to the creation of the world from nothing.
The following serves as an answer: With our comparison, we do not aim to present the true reason why God created the world at one time and not earlier—that would have been sophistry—rather, we merely want to undermine the reason for the opposing view about the eternity of the world. For what we have shown is that God undergoes a change just as little as the immediately active intellect, which is not subject to change, though it does not always act. And this last point is certainly true.
2 If one goes on to say that God cannot have (external) motives and obstacles, that His will must therefore be immutable and the [101] world (as the object of His will) must be eternal,6 the resolution of this doubt will in fact be difficult, and we have no further answer for it, except that God’s will is, like His essence, inscrutable.7 It is therefore not contradictory when we say: The will of God operates according to reasons unknown to us—and without (external) motivations and obstacles—yet only at certain times.
3 The reasoning that people still tend to invoke is that supreme wisdom is eternal in God’s Divine Being; from this it follows that the world, as a consequence of that Being, must also be eternal. But this is very weak, for even God’s decision that the world should attain actuality at a certain time and not earlier is a result of His supreme, inscrutable wisdom.
In the following sections,8 Maimonides tries to undermine Aristotle’s view of the necessity, and consequently, the eternity of the world by showing that if the existence of the world could be explained through necessary natural laws, [102] we should be able to use the same laws to explain the order and arrangement of all appearances. Aristotle makes a great effort to actually do this and explain the order and arrangement of the world according to immutable natural laws. But our Maimonides observes that Aristotle succeeds only with respect to earthly objects, not with regard to the order and arrangement of the heavenly bodies. For everything that Aristotle established here, in his doctrine of nature, was overturned by Ptolemy’s theory of the arrangement of the world in eccentric circles, the epicycles, and such things. We can, Maimonides says, identify a reason for only some of the appearances on earth. The arrangement and order of the heavenly bodies is, by contrast, fully unknown to us.9 God kept heaven for Himself; earth, however, He gave to humans.10 Maimonides draws the following conclusion from this: that because the actuality of the world cannot be explained by the necessity of nature, it [103] must be a consequence of God’s inscrutable will.
Here I must remark that Maimonides’ objection to Aristotle’s views sails wide of its mark. The world may be, in terms of time, finite or infinite; still, everything in it (as consequences of the highest wisdom) must be explainable through the principle of sufficient reason. How far we can actually get in achieving this is beside the point. Those things that Maimonides, working with the astronomy of his day, regarded as inexplicable, new discoveries (particularly Newton’s system) equip us to explain quite well. The highest order in the arrangement of world’s structure is for us a necessary idea of reason, which, through the use of reason with regard to objects of experience, we can approach but never reach.11 There will always be plenty of appearances that we regard, on account of their immutability, as subject to general laws but that can’t be derived from such laws, and that [104] are thus to be always regarded by us as axioms.
Even the excellent Newtonian system leaves many holes in this area. It’s not only the case that many appearances can’t be explained through the laws of general attraction and thus point to even more general laws, under which one can conceive them being subsumed along with the others into a unity. It’s also the case that even the appearances that can be explained through the laws of general attraction bring us back, in the end, to something inexplicable. In this system, we find, for example, the greatest agreement among the size, distance, and orbiting times of the planets. This agreement, however, would also exist even if one of these data were different from what it actually is and the others were in line with them. That these data are so and not otherwise can thus only be regarded as an axiom of nature. But this argumentum ad ignorantiam allows for conclusions neither for nor against the eternity of the world, [105] and Newton himself appears not to attach much importance to this.
In the following section, Maimonides says that he doesn’t reject the notion of the eternity of the world because it runs counter to the conventional meaning of several passages in the Holy Scripture (where the creation of the world is described).12 For these passages can also be interpreted in such a way that they cohere with that notion. Rather, he rejects it mainly because it militates against miracles and the attendant faith in a revealed religion.—
Because I cannot deal expansively with this material here, I will postpone this for another occasion.
In the following sections,13 Maimonides explains prophecy as a natural occurrence: that is, according to psychological laws. Prophecies can be distinguished from common psychological phenomena only through the perfection of the subject and the truth and importance of their messages. [106] But because I have already developed this idea in an essay about the auguring capacity (Deutsche Monatsschrift), I will simply refer the reader to that earlier work.14 [107]
1 Namely, Guide 2:17–22.
2 Guide 2:17 | Pines 2:294–95.
3 Guide 2:17 | Pines 2:298.
4 A somewhat similar reading of the Kantian antinomies as creating space for faith was also offered by Maimon’s contemporary, Pinhas Eliyahu Hurwitz in Sefer ha-Brit. On Hurwitz, see David Ruderman, A Bestselling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of the Covenant of Pinhas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), and the review by Yitzhak Melamed, “The Angel and the Covenant,” Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2016.
5 Guide 2:18 | Pines 2:299.
6 Guide 2:18 | Pines 2:300–301.
7 Here Maimon diverges very significantly from Maimonides’ text and gives the opponent much more ground than Maimonides is willing to give.
8 Guide 2:19–24.
9 Guide 2:24 | Pines 2:326.
10 Ps. 115:16.
11 On Maimon’s notion of “Idea of Reason,” see Maimon, VT, 44–48.
12 Guide 2:25 | Pines 2:327–28.
13 Guide 2:32–48. Maimon skips the discussion of Guide 2:26–31.
14 Maimon, “Über das Vorhersehungsvermögen,” Deutsche Monatsschrift (1791), 2:45–67. Reprinted in Maimon GW, 3:276–98.