The Matter and Form of Maimonides' Guide

Josef Stern

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674075979
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed has traditionally been read as an attempt to harmonize reason and revelation. Another, more recent interpretation takes the contradiction between philosophy and religion to be irreconcilable, and concludes that the Guide prescribes religion for the masses and philosophy for the elite. Moving beyond these familiar debates, Josef Stern argues that the perplexity addressed in this famously enigmatic work is not the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem but the tension between human matter and form, between the body and the intellect.Maimonides' philosophical tradition takes the perfect life to be intellectual: pure, undivided contemplation of all possible truths, from physics and cosmology to metaphysics and God. According to the Guide, this ideal cannot be realized by humans. Their embodied minds cannot achieve scientific knowledge of metaphysics, and their bodily impulses interfere with exclusive contemplation. Closely analyzing the arguments in the Guide and its original use of the parable as a medium of philosophical writing, Stern articulates Maimonides' skepticism about human knowledge of metaphysics and his heterodox interpretations of scriptural and rabbinic parables. Stern shows how, in order to accommodate the conflicting demands of the intellect and the body, Maimonides creates a repertoire of spiritual exercises, reconceiving the Mosaic commandments as training for the life of the embodied mind. By focusing on the philosophical notions of matter and form, and the interplay between its literary form and subject matter, Stern succeeds in developing a unified, novel interpretation of the Guide.

1

Matter and Form

1. Three Themes about Matter and Form

The words “matter” and “form” in the title of this book each have two meanings. In one sense, they refer to the philosophical notions of matter (Arab.: mādda, Hebrew: homer, golem) and form (Arab.: ṣura, Hebrew: tzurah) as they are employed in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. In a second, they signify the singular form of composition of the Guide and its philosophical subject matter. The aim of this book is to show that these two pairs of notions are connected and how, through their interplay, it is possible to give a unified reading of the Guide.

Let me sketch the story in broad strokes. Within Maimonides’ Neoplatonized Aristotelian framework, the ideal human perfection is full actualization of one’s intellect, a perfection one achieves by acquiring and then contemplating all possible concepts and truths—of physics, metaphysics, and the heavens. But Maimonides also believes that the human’s matter, or body, prevents him from achieving this state of perfection. In particular, it prevents him from complete apprehension of metaphysics and the heavens and from constantly reflecting on what he has grasped. The result is tension between his intellect and his body. The human—Maimonides included—is left at most with a limited, partial, intermittent comprehension of metaphysics, hence, with less than the ideal human perfection. The Guide is Maimonides’ attempt to give expression to this—his own—state of incomplete knowledge: of God, the ultimate causes of nature, and the heavens. It is also an articulation in words of the human’s—including his own—intellectual experience in attempting to grasp these “secrets”—that is, enigmas or not completely understood truths—given his epistemic limitations.

Maimonides does not believe he was the first to make this attempt. Earlier attempts can be recovered, he thinks, from parables found in prophetic and rabbinic texts. Hence, a central part of his project involves interpretation of these classic products of Judaism and identification of the philosophical contexts from which they emerged. Following the same tradition of writing, Maimonides also invents his own parables to articulate his own limited understanding of the “secrets” of metaphysics and of his predecessors’ attempts to express their limited understanding. By walking his reader through the parables of the Guide, Maimonides attempts to initiate him in the same intellectual experience he underwent in his attempt to understand metaphysics. This mode of reading is one of a number of exercises through which Maimonides guides his reader, exercises that train him to live a life as perfect as possible given the bodily constraints on his intellect.

Maimonides uses various images to describe the inquirer’s intellectual experience while engaged in inquiry into metaphysics: a tug-of-war of perplexity, lightning-like flashes, dazzlement. However, the parable, he thinks, is the primary verbal form by which his ancient predecessors among the rabbis and the Greek philosophers attempted to put their incomplete knowledge into words. What Maimonides means by a “parable” (Arab.: mathal, Heb.: mashal) is quite specific and sui generis. The Arabic term can mean “simile,” “example,” “comparison,” and more.¹ The Maimonidian parable is not necessarily, as the term is often used nowadays, a narrative with a religious or moral message that typically can be stated in explicit, literal, discursive language. It is nothing like New Testament parables or the allegories of Latin allegoresis, although some translate mathal/mashal as “allegory.” As we shall see, Maimonides takes a parable to be any systematically polysemous or multisignificant text with three kinds or “layers” of meaning, differentiated by their respective contents, whose structure is shaped by cognitive constraints. It need not have any other literary feature we associate with parables. It might be best to leave the term mathal/mashal untranslated, but we shall generally use the word “parable” in order to connect Maimonides’ device to the rabbinic parable (mashal) in whose tradition he situates his own inventions.

Maimonides believes that he stands in a philosophical tradition that began with Moses and continued through the prophets and the classical rabbinic authors of the midrashim and aggadot (I:Intro.:8–9). The Guide is not the first guide. The first guide was “that book which guides all those who seek guidance toward what is correct and therefore is called Torah” (III:13:453). Punning on the Hebrew verb horoth, Maimonides tells us that his Moreh, the Hebrew translation of the Arabic Dalāla, is in effect a second Torah and that the Torah is the first Moreh.² All authors in this tradition employ the same compositional techniques, from the use of equivocal terms to parables and “chapter headings.” For this reason, because they all belong to one tradition, Maimonides tells us that his aim in explicating equivocal scriptural terms in Part I of the Guide is not only to clarify their occurrences in the verses he explicitly mentions. It is also to build a lexicon that can be used to interpret those terms in all “the books of prophecy and other works composed by men of knowledge” and to provide “a key to this Treatise and to others” (I:8:33–34, my emphasis), that is, to those same words as he uses them in the Guide. One key opens all texts in the tradition, from the Torah to the Guide.

Like his predecessors, and for the same epistemological reasons, Maimonides employs the parable both to express his own limited insights into metaphysics and to explicate his predecessors’ understanding of metaphysics as expressed in scriptural and rabbinic parables. Yet while self-consciously situating himself in this tradition, Maimonides also breaks out of it, in part because he realizes that it is in crisis. Although the tradition was oral, the Guide is a written work. Although the tradition was a tradition—passed on from teacher to student in compliance with the rabbinic constraints on transmitting “secrets”—Maimonides emphasizes that he had no teacher and underwent no revelation (III:Intro:416). Unlike scriptural parables that are not labeled as such, Maimonides identifies many of his parables. While concealing “secrets” as tradition requires, he publicly announces his act of concealing.³ And unprecedented in the tradition, the Guide equips its reader with the tools to interpret its parables: a philosophical lexicon of scriptural and rabbinic terms and a repertoire of philosophical arguments that provide a prolegomena to the parables. These arguments include the “proofs” of the mutakallimūn, or theologians, and the “demonstrations” of the falāsifa, or philosophers, together with Maimonides’ critiques. Together with the lexicon, they are the “key” that unlocks the parables of the Guide. This “key” is not a code by which we decode the parables into straightforward philosophical discourse. Rather, the lexicon and arguments constitute a context in which, or perspective from which, Maimonides’ own parabolically expressed insights can be glimpsed—“glimpsed” because neither the scriptural and the rabbinic parables Maimonides interprets nor his own interpretations expressed in parables admit the explicit, discursive, systematic exposition of the sort found in a science. But by mastering the vocabulary and the range of arguments, the reader acquires the skills needed to recover and recognize, modulo his own epistemic limitations, the philosophical insights in Maimonides’ parables. By leading the reader through examples as exercises in reading philosophical parables, Maimonides guides, or teaches, by demonstrating these skills.

Why can the human intellect achieve only an incomplete, limited understanding of metaphysics? The grounds for Maimonides’ arguments bring us back to the first of the two senses of “matter” and “form” in the title of this book: the obstructing role of a human’s matter, or body, to the perfection of his form, or intellect. Intellectual perfection, or total actualization of the intellect, must satisfy two conditions. It requires (1) complete knowledge of the intelligibles and sciences, including (sublunar) physics, cosmology, and metaphysics, and (2) constant engagement in the act, or activity, of intellectually apprehending and reflecting on intelligibles and truths. Maimonides repeatedly states that this is the ideal and true human perfection. However, possibly the most contested question in recent scholarship about the Guide is whether he also thought that the ideal is humanly realizable. There are two camps in the debate. Those who hold that Maimonides believes that it is humanly possible to achieve metaphysical knowledge, if not of all subjects, then of some and at least in part, I shall call, borrowing from Kant, “dogmatic” interpreters of the Guide. Those who challenge that assumption I shall call “skeptical” interpreters.⁴

On the skeptical interpretation, the human’s matter, or body along with its needs, desires, and faculties (such as the imagination), is “a strong veil preventing the apprehension of that which is separate from matter as it truly is” (III:9:436). Moreover, there are two ways in which matter, or the body, is a veil: either matter can obstruct concentration and undivided contemplation of divine science or it can prevent (true) representation and, thus, knowledge of the divine. First, matter prevents concentration through its demands to satisfy one’s bodily needs and desires. When they are excessive, matter is also a source of moral imperfection. But even where its demands are minimal, any attention to basic needs is an obstacle to the total concentration required for intellectual perfection. Second, the human’s matter, and especially his imagination, a bodily faculty that retains and manipulates or composes sensory images, interferes with his proper representation and apprehension of pure forms (including the separate intellects) and truths. From these two obstacles Maimonides draws two “skeptical” implications: (i) With respect to some claims, especially in cosmology but also metaphysics, there are limitations on the capacity of the human intellect to achieve scientific knowledge. (ii) With respect to other truths, especially about the deity, there are antinomies that render it impossible to achieve scientific knowledge.

My own view, to put my cards on the table, is solidly on the side of the skeptical interpretation. But let me emphasize two qualifications from the start. First, Maimonides’ skeptical critique specifically concerns scientific knowledge—that is, the caliber of knowledge that would enable the human to achieve intellectual perfection or, in medieval terms, that would enable him to achieve the status of an acquired intellect that either is in or leads to conjunction with the Active Intellect. Such knowledge, as we shall see, involves knowing that and what something is, knowing its explanation (or cause) and that it is the explanation, and knowing that it cannot be otherwise than what it is.⁵ Maimonides does not challenge weaker kinds of knowledge or belief, or the certainty of beliefs on which one acts. Second, his skeptical critique is directed exclusively at metaphysics and cosmology, not at the natural sciences or sublunar physics or perceptual knowledge. Maimonides’ skeptical arguments are local, or mitigated, not global.

Nonetheless the consequences of Maimonides’ skeptical critique for his philosophy as a whole are enormous. First, there are the obvious implications for the possibility of human knowledge about God, His existence, and attributes, and about the separate intellects that are posited by the philosophers to explain the motions of the spheres and, in turn, sublunar physical motion, the “governance” (tadbīr) of the world. Even well-known Maimonidean claims, such as the nondemonstrability of both the eternity and the creation of the world, take on a different significance when seen from a skeptical perspective. The medieval Aristotelian assumptions that human happiness, immortality, and providence are a function of intellectual perfection call for reexamination. Finally, if one of Maimonides’ skeptical arguments challenges our knowledge of a criterion to distinguish the intellect and imagination, then the veracity of prophecy, and with it the Law, is thrown into question. Given the enormity of these consequences, it is no surprise that many recent scholars have recoiled from the very suggestion that Maimonides believes in severe limitations on the human intellectual capacity to know metaphysics.

Because of my own finite capacity, let alone constraints of space, I will not be able to address all these issues in this book. I shall, however, address the general moral Maimonides intends his reader to draw from his skeptical critique. Following Robert Fogelin (1985), let us distinguish the theoretical skeptical claim that we lack the credentials for scientific knowledge of, say, God’s existence from the normative skeptical claim that we ought to suspend judgment or belief that God exists. Does the former entail the latter? Could one be a theoretical but not a normative skeptic? Could one acknowledge the lack of grounds and not prescribe a skeptical course of action? Depending...