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Overview
A classic of medieval Jewish philosophy, Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is as influential as it is difficult and demanding. Not only does the work contain contrary—even contradictory—statements, but Maimonides deliberately wrote in a guarded and dissembling manner in order to convey different meanings to different readers, with the knowledge that many would resist his bold reformulations of God and his relation to mankind. As a result, for all the acclaim the Guide has received, comprehension of it has been unattainable to all but a few in every generation.
Drawing on a lifetime of study, Alfred L. Ivry has written the definitive guide to the Guide—one that makes it comprehensible and exciting to even those relatively unacquainted with Maimonides’ thought, while also offering an original and provocative interpretation that will command the interest of scholars. Ivry offers a chapter-by-chapter exposition of the widely accepted Shlomo Pines translation of the text along with a clear paraphrase that clarifies the key terms and concepts. Corresponding analyses take readers more deeply into the text, exploring the philosophical issues it raises, many dealing with metaphysics in both its ontological and epistemic aspects.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226395265 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 324 |
| Sales rank: | 602,210 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed
A Philosophical Guide
By Alfred L. Ivry
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-39526-5
CHAPTER 1
A Concise Biography
Maimonides was born in 1138 in Cordoba, Spain, which was then part of the Almoravid empire. The Almoravids were Moors from North Africa who originally invaded Spain with the declared intention to establish a more strict observance of Islam among the faithful. This led them to attempt to rid the country of Jews and Christians, formerly tolerated as fellow monotheists. Those who persisted in their original belief were persecuted and ostensibly had to choose between exile and apostasy. Maimonides' father, Maimun ben Joseph, a leader of the community, wrote a "Letter of Consolation" urging his fellow Jews to observe as much of the Law as possible, even if it had to be kept secretly. It may be inferred from this that many Jews chose to remain in Spain and publicly professed allegiance to Islam, while privately retaining their ancestral faith.
In 1148 the Almohads, another Berber group from the Atlas Mountains, overran Andalusia with the same rationale as the Almoravids, the latter's religious zeal ostensibly gone lax. The Almohad rulers again forced non-Muslims either to convert or to leave the country without their possessions. Many in the Jewish community again chose a third way, that of dissembling their allegiance to the Prophet of Islam. It is possible that Maimonides' father chose this path, for we hear nothing of him or his children for twelve long years, despite his position of leadership in the Jewish community. When they emerge it is in Fez, the Almohad capital, so it is likely they passed as Muslims for that period of time, a period in which Maimonides concentrated on his studies, mastering the texts of both the Jewish religious tradition and the Graeco-Muslim philosophical and scientific tradition.
An early indication of Maimonides' absorption in philosophy is to be found in his Treatise on the Art of Logic, a handbook of key terms and definitions that form the basis for scientific reasoning. Maimonides' information is taken from the treatises on Aristotelian logic compiled by Alfarabi, the Muslim philosopher whom Maimonides most admired. Maimonides writes allegedly at the request of a traditionally educated but philosophically innocent patron, apparently Muslim, who wishes to have the technical language, categories, and divisions of logic briefly explained to him.
Herbert Davidson has challenged the claim that Maimonides wrote this treatise, both because his name does not appear on some extant early manuscripts, and because in one place the author brings Moses and Jesus into a temporal relationship in order to exemplify a logical point. Now, while the Jew Maimonides might not have chosen to adduce the Christian messiah as an appropriate figure in a treatise intended for a Jewish reader, as Davidson argues, a dissimulating Muslim Maimonides would not have had to be that sensitive, especially for a Muslim reader. Nothing else is decisively Jewish, or Muslim, in this treatise. It is thus highly likely that Maimonides composed the treatise in Spain or the Maghreb, while posing as a Muslim.
Another early work, written in 1157–58 while Maimonides was still somewhere in Andalusia, is a treatise on the calendar, intended to assist people in understanding the vagaries of the rabbinically calculated lunar year. Maimonides here shows an early grasp of mathematics and astronomy that he was to expand upon in the chapter "Laws of the Sanctification of the Moon" in his law code, the Mishneh Torah.
At the time of his initial scientific forays in print, Maimonides was also absorbed in writing preliminary commentaries on portions of both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. As well, he began then to comment on the Mishnah, a neglected text usually subsumed within commentaries that focus more on the later talmudic stratum of the Gemara.
The first major public statement that Maimonides put his name and Jewish identity to is "Letter on Apostasy" (Iggeret ha-Shemad), also known as "Treatise on Martyrdom" (Ma'amar Qiddush ha-Shem), which he wrote while still in Fez. In it he assured those of his co-religionists who had "converted" to Islam that they would be welcomed back to Judaism if they chose to return. He urged that they should make every effort to do so, though it meant leaving their homes and wealth.
Maimonides wrote in response to a French rabbi's more severe, though legally/halachically correct, edict that ruled against those who committed apostasy (however nominally), denying them the right of return. This put those who wished to remain Jewish in Spain in the position of having to accept martyrdom, should they be put to the test.
In his statement, Maimonides implies that the reality of life under the Almohads is not what it might seem to an outsider, that after their Islamic "confession of faith," the Shahada, nothing further is asked of the Jews, and they are able to pursue their own religion discreetly. In a highly daring and innovative ruling, Maimonides distinguished speech acts from other actions that testify to the adoption of another faith, claiming that these oral confessions are understood by everyone to be disingenuous and hence do not sever the individual's tie to his ancestral faith. In so writing, Maimonides may be seen as following his father's pragmatic approach in responding to threats to Jewish survival, bending the law to accommodate a frightening reality.
It is not surprising that having gone public in a matter that required discretion, Maimonides with his family — father, brother, and presumably mother and sister (or sisters) — soon thereafter emigrated from the lands of Almohad rule. They traveled east, first sailing to Palestine and then overland to Egypt. In leaving the land of Israel after having set foot in it, and in settling in Egypt, Maimonides violated injunctions that he was to endorse later in the Mishneh Torah, not the first or last inconsistency life and his public responsibilities demanded of him.
The Maimon family's departure from the Holy Land, after brief visits to Jerusalem and Hebron, was a realistic decision, given the bleak economic and social conditions of the small and impoverished Jewish community in Palestine and the political turmoil and danger there caused by the ongoing fighting between Crusaders and Saracens. By contrast, Egypt was home to a sizable Jewish community that benefited from a long-standing, relatively tolerant Fatimid regime. The safety of the Jewish community was not affected by Saladin's overthrow of this regime shortly after the Maimon family arrived in 1165, nor by Saladin's installation of an Ayyubid Sunni regime to replace the Shi'i confession of the Fatimids.
The Maimon family chose to live in Fustat, adjacent to the new capitol of Cairo, where Maimonides' services as a physician were sought by the court. He had studied medicine in the course of his education prior to coming to Egypt, arriving as both an accomplished rabbinic scholar and a medical practitioner, eventually to become an author and authority in both genres. Maimonides' medical treatises were mostly written later in his life. Some were of a comprehensive sort intended to serve as a primer for physicians; others were dedicated to a particular person and medical problem. Galen was his mentor, and most of the material in Maimonides' Medical Aphorisms and other works is taken from the translated writings of that sage of Pergamum.
We know of Maimonides' life in Egypt primarily from his extensive correspondence, in some of which he speaks very personally. He was quickly recognized as an authority in halakhic matters for the Rabbanite community, and was apparently appointed ra'is al-yahud, "head" of the entire Egyptian Jewish community, soon after Saladin's assumption of power. He held that fiercely contested office for a year or two in the period 1171–73, and possibly again in the 1190s. Maimonides' reputation spread, and with or without an official title he was inundated with legal questions bearing on all aspects of life from all over the Jewish world.
Maimonides' stature as a halakhic "decisor," that is, a person qualified to issue legal rulings, was based primarily on two monumental compositions: his Commentary on the Mishnah (finished in 1168, though often revised) and a code of Jewish law, called in Hebrew Mishneh Torah (completed in 1177). In what follows I focus mainly on presenting the philosophical components in the Commentary on the Mishnah, and will do the same for the Mishneh Torah in the next chapter. The opinions he presents in these two books often serve as background for views he presents or assumes are known in the Guide. While scholars often interpret the Guide's statements in light of these earlier works, and attempt to resolve all apparent conflicts between them, I have largely avoided this methodology, for reasons given in the preface.
The Commentary on the Mishnah covers all sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah, a second-century (CE) work edited in Palestine. Maimonides concisely synthesizes the Mishnaic discussion of a particular issue, stresses the normative interpretations given, and often provides the methodological rule or rules whereby a particular decision is to be inferred. He contextualizes the original material within the discourse and perspectives of the later Amoraim of the Talmud. As he implies in the introduction to his commentary, Maimonides does the work of the reader for him: a person would no longer have to study the Gemara in order to understand the Mishnah.
This could be seen as a (possibly unconscious) first step in Maimonides' vision of reforming the curriculum of Jewish studies, devoted nearly in its entirety to study of the Talmud. The second step was that taken in his law code, the Mishneh Torah. There Maimonides restructured the entire body of rabbinic law, organizing it topically in a presentation free of the dialectic found in the Talmud. As Maimonides announces in his introduction to this work, one would need to study only the Torah and Maimonides' Mishneh Torah to know the Law and be able to follow it.
In addition to synthesizing the Mishnaic material in his commentary on that work, Maimonides composed three essays in the form of introductions that introduce extralegal themes into that work. The first introduction, at the beginning of the commentary, purports to be historical. Maimonides traces an unbroken line of transmission of the oral law from Moses to Judah HaNasi (second century CE), the final redactor of the Mishnah. That book (and its fifth-century companion, the Gemara) is the heritage of rabbinic Judaism, passed on by the Geonim, the religious leaders of post-talmudic times, to Maimonides. In his view, he is the recipient of the Law in all its fullness and authority, a law that will never be altered or surpassed. This position expresses the view of Rabbanite Jewry, faced with internal challenges from Karaites who rejected the oral law in its rabbinic formulation, and from external supersessionist challenges of both Christians and Muslims.
Maimonides' second introduction, called Heleq, prefaces his commentary to the tenth chapter of the Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin. It is so called since the Mishnah opens with the statement (soon qualified) that "all Israel has a portion [heleq] in the world to come." Maimonides takes this opportunity to introduce something that was common among Muslim jurists, but largely foreign to Jews: a set of fundamental principles of the faith. Maimonides counts thirteen such, a number much disputed by later rabbis, but one that came to have near universal popularity and that entered into the liturgy in the poetic Yigdal hymn sung on Sabbath eve.
Maimonides presents these principles dogmatically, offering immortality to those who accept them, and threatening death to those who doubt even one of them. In terms often borrowed from a philosophical lexicon that would have been foreign to many of his readers, Maimonides' principles include belief in the existence of a being that is perfect; the cause of all else; uniquely one and eternal; incorporeal, creating the world "after" absolute nothingness (literally, absence or "privation" of being, 'adam in Arabic); and alone deserving worship and obedience, all worship of others being prohibited and considered idolatry.
Belief in prophecy is the sixth principle, described in terms of a union or "conjunction" with the Agent Intellect and emanation from it, concepts that would have mystified many of Maimonides' readers then (and still do now), but which would have been familiar to those readers who had some philosophical training. The preeminence of Moses as a prophet is another principle, as is the belief that the Torah was revealed to him by God and will never be abrogated or changed.
The tenth principle proclaims God's knowledge of the actions of human beings, followed by the assurance that reward and punishment are attuned to a person's observance of the Law. The great reward is life in the world to come, even as the most dreaded punishment is exclusion from that, i.e., the loss of immortality. The afterlife envisaged is purely spiritual, as Maimonides explained earlier in the chapter. Maimonides concludes with affirming belief in the advent of the Messiah, for whom one should wait patiently, and with a two-word (!) affirmation of the principle of resurrection.
This decision to write a catechism of Jewish belief was part of Maimonides' desire to present Judaism in as clear and explicit a manner as possible, theologically as well as legalistically. As a rationalist, he believed it important to have a clear idea of the essential beliefs of one's faith, even if the philosophical style of his presentation would have been less than clear to most of his nonphilosophical readers.
Maimonides' third introduction in the Commentary on the Mishnah is in its way also revolutionary. He writes it in eight chapters preceding his commentary on the tractate Avot, "Fathers," and it therefore came to be known as Eight Chapters (Shemonah Peraqim). "Fathers" itself is a collection of gnomoi, wise sayings of a moral and pietistic kind, charmingly unsystematic. In his introduction, Maimonides largely ignores the following Mishnah and imposes a mostly Aristotelian ethic upon Judaism, adopting Alfarabi's earlier appropriation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
Maimonides does not accept everything Aristotle has to say about human nature and society. As Aristotle himself saw ethics and politics as conditioned by particular circumstances and conventions, and thus not subjects given to universal pronouncements or demonstrative proofs, Maimonides was free to modify his sources in accordance with the particular mores of his society. At the same time, Maimonides felt, as did his predecessors, that civilized human beings share a large body of values and that most virtues and vices are universally "well known" as such, allowing (quasi-scientific) categorization. Thus, in chapter 6 of Eight Chapters, he identifies murder, theft, robbery, fraud, injuring the innocent, ingratitude, and disrespect toward parents as well-known vices. Later, in his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides considers the seven Noahide mizvot (treated here as laws) in a similar near-universal light.
In the first chapter of Eight Chapters, Maimonides describes the human soul in terms discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and Galen. The originally Platonic division of the soul into reason, spirit, and appetite is mentioned, followed by a brief outline of the five faculties Aristotle first delineated: the nutritive, sensory, imaginative, rational, and appetitive faculties. These are all seen as part of a single soul, and the relation of the other faculties to the rational faculty is considered that of matter to form. Though Maimonides does not elaborate further, in the Guide he will apply this analogy literally and treat all the faculties of the soul other than the intellect as materially conditioned and hence perishable.
As the form of the soul, the rational faculty is meant to govern the other faculties, particularly the sentient and appetitive ones, which are prone to succumb to temptation. It is these faculties, and particularly the appetitive one, to which the Law addresses commandments, and it is to these faculties that the moral virtues are directed. It is inconceivable to Maimonides that one would willfully disobey a commandment to which the rational faculty assents, whereas physical desires, as perceptions, have no such innate check. A person's soul must therefore be acculturated toward virtue and become aware of the corresponding vices.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed by Alfred L. Ivry. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction
Background
1 A Concise Biography
2 The Mishneh Torah
3 Maimonides’ Graeco-Islamic Philosophical Heritage
The Guide of the Perplexed: Paraphrases and Analyses
4 Wrestling with Language (Guide I, Introduction and Chapters 1–68)
Paraphrase
Analysis
5 Kalām Claims and Counterclaims (Guide I, Chapters 69–76)
Paraphrase
Analysis
6 Philosophy Affirmed and Qualified; Creation (Guide II, Introduction and Chapters 1–31)
Paraphrase
Analysis
7 Prophecy (Guide II, Chapters 32–48)
Paraphrase
Analysis
8 The Metaphysics of the Chariot (Guide III, Introduction and Chapters 1–7)
Paraphrase
Analysis
9 Providence and (Apparent) Evil (Guide III, Chapters 8–25)
Paraphrase
Analysis
10 Rationalizing the Law (Guide III, Chapters 26–50)
Paraphrase
Analysis
11 True Knowledge and Perfection (Guide III, Chapters 51–54)
Paraphrase
Analysis
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Recommended Readings
Bibliography
Index