Maimonides, son and father of History?
by Hubert HANNOUN
Professor at the Universities of Burgundy and Provence
Maimonides, a political thinker of his time
A thinker of stature is always, at once, the product of an age and one of the engines of its overcoming. Maimonides is one of those thinkers.
He is a man of his time. As a physician, he is the practitioner of a non-experimental medicine — we are still far from Claude Bernard — and his conclusions today raise a smile only in those who cannot grasp the density of the conquests which, from 1138 to 1993, have marked the slow process of human science. As a political figure and philosopher, in Egypt from 1165 onward, Maimonides is essentially a lord responsible for the country’s Jewish community, indeed for the Mediterranean Jewish communities. He is a lord in a feudal — and still slave-owning — society, with what appears to us today as its scandalous self-evidences and its astonishing stereotypes. It is in this way that one can understand how the lord Maimonides came to be led, within the framework of social structures that subordinated women, to deny her any right to that culture of the Jewish elite of the time which is the study of the Talmud and the Torah1.
In the same way, Maimonides’s two essential works in the matter of philosophy and law are, on the one hand, the Mishneh Torah, a kind of summary of the Talmud at the point of redaction it had reached in the twelfth century, and the Moreh Ha-Nevukhim (Guide of the Perplexed), which deals fundamentally with the principal philosophical questions of the time. The coexistence of these two works cannot be understood unless one connects them to Maimonides-the-lord as their author — a lord in whom there sometimes shows through a certain contempt for the “vulgar,” judged incapable of attaining the apprehension of philosophical truths2. The Mishneh Torah is a collection of precepts setting out the duty-to-do of everyone of that time, a popular everyone disoriented by the complexity of the talmudic texts, which had reached an advanced degree of compilations sometimes contradicting one another. This collection is intended for the “vulgar,” who must be enlightened as to what they must do without thereby being fit to grasp the why of it3. The Moreh Ha-Nevukhim, by contrast, is intended for the intellectual elite — which can often be identified with the feudal elite — who alone can attain the heights of philosophical thought. This work is elitist, as it could not but be at that period, written as it was by a philosopher-lord4. It addresses itself to those — a small number — who alone will be able to grasp its deep meaning.
A relative contempt for woman and for the people are there, among other tendencies, two characteristics of the Mediterranean feudal society of the twelfth century which, whatever his genius may otherwise have been, Maimonides did not escape.
Maimonides, a thinker who anticipated the modern philosophy of knowledge
If Maimonides reflected the society that bore him, he brought to it, in return, lights whose reflections still reach our own age. We have chosen gnoseology [theory of knowledge] to illustrate this observation: the critique Maimonides makes of human knowledge, of its power as well as its limits, is not without recalling certain conclusions of contemporary epistemology, up to and including those of the so-called theories of complexity5.
A text from the Moreh Ha-Nevukhim seems to us particularly significant on this subject. There one can read (Guide of the Perplexed — Munk trans. — I.31 — pp. 107–108):
“Alexander of Aphrodisias says that the causes of disagreement about certain things are three in number:
“1/ Ambitious and rival pretensions, which prevent man from perceiving the truth.
“2/ The subtlety of the perceptible thing in itself, its depth and the difficulty of perceiving it.
“3/ The ignorance of the one who perceives and his inability to grasp even what it is possible to grasp.
“This is what Alexander of Aphrodisias says.
“In our time, there is a fourth cause that he
“did not mention, because it did not exist among
“them; it is habit and education, for it is
“in man’s nature to love what is familiar to him and to be drawn to it.”
What density and depth this text has, if any does! In it Maimonides denounces the principal causes of error in the search for truth, and of the consequent discords among men.
The first of these causes lies at the level of the “ambitious and rival pretensions” which, more than reasons and beyond all reason, form the motives for adherence to this or that opinion or doctrine. The present data of the psychology of knowledge make it possible to perceive with some certainty that this adherence is provoked by a psychic complex within which the factors arising from reflection (the logic of reasoning, rational argumentation, reference to experience, etc.) inevitably contend with motives of affective origin (the “wish” to believe, unconscious drives, affective a prioris, social archetypes, personal or partisan interests, etc.).
Without yet being able to refer to a psychological or sociological apparatus that did not exist in his time, Maimonides nonetheless has here the intuition of those mechanisms of knowledge which we analyze today.
The second cause of error and of the difficulty of knowing lies at the level of the very object of knowledge. This object resists our apprehension, sometimes, not so much — nor solely — by reason of our inability to apprehend it but by reason of its very structure, which proves not to be complementary to our own mental structures.
The object is a railway car whose axle gauge is 1.40 m and which one wants to run on a track (our mental structure) whose rail gauge is 1.60 m. German philosophy speaks, in this connection, of an object that is “grundlos” — without foundation, meaning without an objective foundation coinciding with our logic.
The contemporary theories of complexity advance nothing other than this when they affirm that every object carries within itself, at once, an order (corresponding to our logical order) and, inevitably, a disorder escaping any apprehension possible by our mental structures and thus forming the quasi-infinite field of tomorrow’s research6.
Every claim to a total knowledge of the world is banished, at once, by Maimonides and by contemporary epistemology.
The third cause of error, the third obstacle to the discovery of truth, is more commonly noted: it lies at the level of the weakness of the human mind, of its inability to coordinate itself. In modern language we would say, still confirming the Maimonidean thesis, that such a mind is, of course, not fit to grasp the ungraspable disorder of the object, but, moreover, does not even apprehend its order.
The fourth cause of error constitutes Maimonides’s own contribution. This cause lies at the level of “habit and education.” How can one fail to see here the contemporary reference to all those mental conditionings that the acceleration of modes of communication has accentuated?
If, for Maimonides, the one who is in error is the victim of “habit and education,” we would say, in our present-day language, that he is the one who cannot avoid the prevention and precipitation denounced by Descartes, the one who is the victim of the “rape of crowds,” the one in whom the I has disappeared before the weight of the WE.
In this sense, by this denunciation of “habit and education” in Maimonides — a denunciation of all the causes external to himself that make the individual fail to reach the autonomy of his judgment — by this denunciation, then, Maimonides falls directly in line with the essential structure of modern thought considered in its deliberately individualist perspective. The claim of the Cartesian I THINK, with all the solipsism it presupposes, is already there.
Maimonides, in his attempt to go beyond every collective mode of knowledge, makes himself the champion of autonomous individual reflection. A sign of our time7, the Cartesian cogito is in germ in the Moreh Ha-Nevukhim.
Maimonides, a thinker who anticipated contemporary metaphysics
The question at which gnoseology attains the dimensions of a metaphysics is that of the limits of human knowledge. Can we know everything? In other words: if, as it seems, there is the known, is there also the unknown? Is there the unknowable?
A passage of the Moreh Ha-Nevukhim acquaints us with Maimonides’s position on this subject (cf. Guide of the Perplexed — Munk trans. — II.23 — p. 183, and II.24 — p. 194):
I will speak to you of the grave doubts
that may be raised against the one who believes that human science can give an account of the order of the motions of the celestial sphere, and that these are physical things occurring by a necessary law whose order and concatenation are clear. God alone knows the true nature of the heavens, their substance, their form; but, as for what is below the heavens, he has given man the faculty to know it, for that is his world and the dwelling in which he has been placed and of which he himself forms a part.
Man is therefore able to know the world on the human scale, the “sublunary” world, as it was called in the Maimonidean age. But the distant realities, those situated at another level than this human scale, escape him. Knowledge, in order to be possible, requires the discrimination of different levels of the object of knowledge, from the one that proves close to immediate human experience to the one that arises only from a pure conception of his mind.
How can one fail to underline here that, in many domains, this structuring of the world into several differently apprehensible levels, in Maimonides, recalls certain problematics of contemporary epistemology? Euclidean geometry, an efficient instrument for knowing our human space, must yield its place to the non-Euclidean geometries when it is a matter of discovering the structures of the macro-physical and (perhaps) micro-physical worlds. It does indeed seem that the conquest of the infinitely large or the infinitely small by contemporary science leads, to be sure, not to positing the existence of an absolute unknowable, but to the necessity of a change of methodological instrument for that conquest.
Finally, a no less important aspect of the modernity of Maimonidean thought: its methodological skepticism with regard to any affirmation deriving from a possible knowledge of the absolute. This absolute, so regularly rejected by contemporary thought, Maimonides situates outside any possibility of knowledge. Without denying it, he posits it as unknowable. Even when this absolute bears on the existence of God. Thus he writes (Guide of the Perplexed — Munk trans. — Bk. III — 29 — p. 249):
And this is the truth, for it is impossible for us to have the elements necessary to reason about the heavens, which are far from us and too elevated by their place and their rank; and even the general proof one can draw from them by saying that they prove to us the existence of their mover is a thing to the knowledge of which human intelligences could not attain.
Humility, then, on Maimonides’s part before any claim to an absolute knowledge. Contemporary science continues in the same direction, laying the same foundations for a calling-into-doubt of the absolute itself. Is rational rigor not found to be similar on both sides?
NOTES
One can read in “The Book of Knowledge” by Maimonides (Quadrige/PUF, 1961): Third Section — Chap. 1 — p. 167: “Women, slaves, and small children are exempt from the study of the Law…” Likewise — pp. 172–173: “XIII — If a woman learns the Law, she earns a divine reward, but her merit is not as considerable as that which a man acquires… The Sages advised the father against teaching the Law to his daughter, because most women do not have a mind apt for study and because, owing to the poverty of their understanding, they transform the words of the Law into vain chatter. To teach the Law to one’s daughter is worth as much as teaching her insipid nonsense.”↩︎
See, on this subject, the classification of human categories in Maimonides. Guide of the Perplexed — Munk trans. — Chap. III — 51 — pp. 433–436.↩︎
Maimonides does not conceal his almost instinctive rejection of the people in the following passage (Guide of the Perplexed — Munk trans. — I.35 — pp. 135–136): “Just as one must teach children and proclaim to the masses that God is One and that one must worship none other than him, so too must they accept by tradition that God is not a body… And this must suffice for children and for the vulgar to establish in their minds that there exists a perfect being who is not a body.”↩︎
Maimonides says so clearly in his introduction to the Moreh Ha-Nevukhim (Munk trans. — Bk. I — p. 25): “I had no other alternative, if I wished to find the means of teaching a well-demonstrated truth, than to choose the manner that suits a single distinguished man and displeases ten thousand ignorant ones, and I gave preference to that one person without heeding the blame of the great multitude.” It is known, moreover, that Maimonides’s commentator, Moses Narboni (1300–1362), held that he had constantly masked his true thought from the people so as not to disturb them and not to endanger social peace.↩︎
Cf., on this subject: E. Morin — La méthode (Method) — Vol. 1 — Le Seuil — 1971; Introduction à la pensée complexe (Introduction to Complex Thought) — ESF 1991; G. Nicolis & I. Prigogine: A la rencontre du complexe (Encountering the Complex) — PUF — 1992; Science et pratique de la complexité (Science and Practice of Complexity) — Proceedings of the Montpellier colloquium — May 1984; Les théories de la complexité (The Theories of Complexity) — Cerisy colloquium — Le Seuil — 1990.↩︎
E. Morin writes in this sense (Montpellier colloquium): “Complexity arises first of all as the problem of the irreducibility of disorder.” (op. cit. p. 81).↩︎
Another Jewish author contemporary with Maimonides was likewise to claim the right to strictly individual thought. This is Abu’l-Barakat, who died in Baghdad in 1165, and who writes in one of his works (Kitab al-Mu’tabar): “Into it I have put what I have known, established by personal reflection, verified and perfected through meditation.”↩︎