The Guide of the Perplexed

"I think basically yes. Neither of them is a sceptic about the truth, but al-Ghazālī ends up with a Sufi view and Maimonides remains a committed philosopher. Al-Ghazālī rejects the position that Maimonides advocates. But I think they both think that what they have found is the objective truth, even though they disagree on important issues. Maimonides is probably the most important medieval Jewish philosopher. He lived in the twelfth century, he was born in Córdoba, like Averroës, his famous Muslim colleague. They were both brought up in this vibrant intellectual culture of Muslim Spain, so he’s committed to Plato and Aristotle in particular, but he’s also a committed Jew, like Averroës is a committed Muslim, I think this is what makes Maimonides particularly interesting for me. When there are tensions between his religious commitments and his philosophical commitments, he resolves them by reinterpreting his religious commitments in light of his philosophical commitments. I can give you an example. Maimonides, and also Averroës, both think the best way of proving God’s existence is this cosmological proof that Aristotle develops at the end of the Physics and in book 12 of the Metaphysics. Aristotle argues that there must be an incorporeal unmoved mover who accounts for the eternal circular motion of the celestial spheres around the world. Both Maimonides and Averroës claim that the first to establish this proof was actually not Aristotle but Abraham. They’re trying to embed their philosophical convictions at the very foundation of their religious tradition, since Abraham is a founding father of both Judaism and Islam. Obviously no-one would want to defend this proof today, the cosmology has been blown up by the Copernican revolution. But I think the hermeneutical approach remains an interesting one. You could say a religious intellectual today arguably should reinterpret his religious tradition in light of his considered views about God, the world and the human good. Maimonides, Averroës, and philosophers of this kind, can teach us how to reconcile intellectual commitments with a religious tradition, if one is committed to such a tradition. I think without something of that kind the culture of debate I propose couldn’t really work. If you are a staunch literalist who thinks the literal meaning of the Bible, or the Quran or the Vedas, or whatever, trumps everything, then, when there’s a conflict between your considered views and the literal meaning of the Bible, you will always let the Bible win. You need this hermeneutic openness that Maimonides exemplifies. Exactly, openness. A student approaches him and asks ‘What are the philosophical books worth reading?’ He writes back and provides a list, and on that list you don’t find a single Jewish author. You might find that a bit puzzling, he’s a Jewish philosopher, after all. As you said, he recommends Aristotle and his commentators, and then mostly Muslim philosophers that he values, he doesn’t value them as Muslims but he values them as philosophers. Maimonides says somewhere that one should listen to the truth from whoever says it. He would want to see that principle applied to him. But he has written very little that is pure philosophy. He was mostly interested in this project of reinterpreting Judaism in a philosophical way. In addition, he wrote most of his books, and in particular his philosophical books, in Judeo-Arabic: in Arabic, but with Hebrew letters. Today there’s an Arabic transliteration of The Guide of the Perplexed , so Muslim students can read it with more ease. Through this somewhat accidental fact I think he has limited the readership. Certainly, when someone like Thomas Aquinas was thinking about how to reconcile his Christian commitments with Aristotle, he had Maimonides in Latin translation open on his desk. We know he had an impact on later Christian philosophers who were dealing with similar problems. Meister Eckhart is quite indebted to him and so forth. Overall he didn’t have a huge impact on non-Jewish intellectuals. But he had a huge impact on the Jewish tradition. To this day Maimonides is an icon of enlightenment. Lots of hospitals and schools are named after him. In the Middle Ages he was an extremely controversial figure because the philosophical interpretation of Judaism that he advocated was one a lot of people felt unhappy about."