Reflections on The Guide to the Perplexed
In the decades I’ve spent studying the Rambam’s Guide to the Perplexed I’ve found that I learn more from it every time I open it. In recent years that means I learn from Maimonides’ insights in the Guide continuously. Every day brings new insights; and that experience has often persisted well into the night. The Guide is that rich, and Maimonides’ insights entrusted to it are that profound. The responses of my students and colleagues and those of other philosophers, generalists, and Maimonides specialists in the literature that has emerged since the Guide’s first appearance in Arabic in the late 12th century – commentaries, essays, scholarly articles, and popular pieces, tightly focused studies, and broad reactions – show me that I am not alone in continuing to learn from Maimonides over eight centuries that have passed since he wrote this philosophical masterwork.
It was in 1970, as a young philosopher on a visit to Oxford, that I was first confronted with the need to grapple with the Guide. I’d only a couple of years earlier completed my Oxford D. Phil. on Islamic philosophy. My new university, the University of Hawaii, committed to comparative studies in philosophy, had sent me to Europe to gather Arabic books to enrich their library holdings in that field. I was returning home, when David Patterson, the founding president of the Oxford Centre for Post-graduate Hebrew Studies, reached out to ask me to contribute a volume for a series on Jewish thought that he was editing.
Given my philosophical roots and commitments, Maimondes was the perfect focus. I spent the next six years immersed in the Guide. Viking published my Rambam, a collection of readings from the Guide and from Maimonides’ pioneering work on Jewish virtue ethics, the Eight Chapters, in 1976. I wanted a fresh translation from the original Arabic throughout, and a distinctive feature of my book was my decision to motivate what Maimonides had to teach us by stating the problems and laying out the issues that his arguments intended to address but that he typically left unstated, on the assumption that those tormented by a philosophical crux did not need to have the problem stated for them.
I knew, of course, that the core biblical idea of creation had been problematized for Maimonides’ contemporaries, if they were at all versed in the Arabic philosophical literature. For Aristotle had taken the world to be eternal. He had marked the transition between mythic and philosophical thinking by the shift from questions about where the world came from to what seemed to him a more scientific question: what was it made from – and moving on to the purely philosophical, metaphysical question: what does it mean for a thing to be.
The consensus among Maimonides’ philosophically oriented readers, those who saw themselves as the most astute and best trained in philosophy – was that Aristotle and his Neoplatonic successors, whose Greek works had been translated into Arabic and followed up on in Arabic philosophy – had proved creation to be impossible. Philosophy now seemed to render biblical beliefs naïve. Readers loyal to the Torah were faced with a dilemma, having to choose, it seemed, between (‘aql and naql, reason and tradition). The impasse they faced was captured in the word Ibn Tibbon took from the biblical account of the escaping Israelite slaves trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s chariotry. The Hebrew word was nevukhim(Exodus 14:3), troubled, confused. Jews who knew a bit of philosophy seemed to be caught on the horns of a dilemma: Should they give up the profound religious truths they had been raised with, truths as central as the biblical idea of creation? Or should they try to foreswear what the sciences, philosophy, and logic itself seemed to demand? Creation vs eternity was just one of the many problems that Maimonides set out to address in his Guide to the Perplexed.
I knew, of course, when I started out, that that problem of evil – the suffering of innocents and apparent prosperity of wrongdoers – presents a challenge to any thoughtful monotheist. But I did not yet know why Maimonides avoided naming the problems at the core of his Guide – or why, for that matter, he steamed ahead with his accounts of prophecy in general and of Ezekiel’s striking vision of the “Chariot” (as the supernal throne of God’s glory was called), without first defining his terms or laying out his premises.
It was evident from the first chapter of the Guide that Maimonides, like the Aramaic translation of the Torah traditionally ascribed to Onkelos, had a distaste for anthropomorphic or corporealist descriptions of God. But I had not yet discerned the subtext beneath the Guide’s systematic deconstruction of biblical anthropomorphisms and had not yet recognized how the Rambam’s subtle and oblique analysis of prophetic poetics was devised so as not to leave a sophisticated reader marooned at sea when finally confronted with Maimonides’ trenchant arguments against any attempt to characterize or describe God in language derived (as all our ordinary human language must be) from our experience of the world of finite, contingent things. All this would come. And, as the Rambam himself would say, it would come only with patience and preparation. The fruits of my study in the years since that early book of mine are now available in the new complete translation of the Guide.
I was fortunate when Phillip Lieberman joined me at Vanderbilt as a colleague. His strengths in Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic and his training in history and rabbinics were complementary to my own skills, and we worked together side by side for years on the new translation/commentary, studying the burgeoning literature and often deliberating and debating in extenso the best rendering of Maimonides’ terms and phrases. In the end, I think we have produced the most accessible and intelligible translation that we found possible, striving to preserve the clarity and candor of the Rambam’s argument and the warm conversational tone he chose in addressing his disciple and the many others that he knew would find his Guide valuable in navigating the defile between their commitment to the Torah and their love of philosophy, logic, and the sciences.
Loyal to the Andalusian halakhic, philosophical, and humanistic tradition in which he had been raised from childhood, the heritage of his lost home in Cordoba, preserved by him intellectually in his new home as a communal leader and court physician in Egypt, Maimonides held fast to the conviction that in matters of science one must follow the evidence, and in matters of philosophy one must follow the argument. The Guide to the Perplexed is the emblem and the argument of his conviction that the truths discerned by God-given reason and those God shared with us by way of the gift of revelation will not contradict one another but will only strengthen and intensify one another – and, once well understood, will add to one another’s depth.
Start reading The Guide to the Perplexed: A New Translation »
Listen to an interview with Lenn E. Goodman on the Judaism Unbound podcast »
Thank you Prof. Lenn E. Goodman for sharing your valuable insights on Maimonides. In an era of fake news, information overflow, emotional outbursts and objective analysis-deficit, your thought-provoking remarks on The Guide To the Perplexed are an important guide to the contemporary society.
It may be a great lesson for hyper-sensitive commentators to remember that centuries-ago Maimonides adhered to the principle that in matters of science, one ought to follow the evidence, and in issues of philosophy, one must follow the argument. This is how The Guide to the Perplexed is lighthouse for the twenty-first century. Its message that the truths discerned by God-given reason and those God shared with us by way of the gift of revelation will not contradict one another are significant. In fact, they will complement and supplement, reinforce one another. When properly understood, they will corroborate one another.
Posted by: Dr. Kishor Dere | August 12, 2024 at 03:49 AM