Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 161 - He Moves in Mysterious Ways - Maimonides on Eternity.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, He Moves in Mysterious Ways, Maimonides on Eternity. I don't mean to complain, but figuring out the history of philosophy can sometimes be pretty difficult. Figures in the history of philosophy, both great and small, wrote in all these inconvenient other languages until they finally learned English, were careless about making sure their works were preserved in reliable manuscripts, and generally gave very little thought to the plight of future podcasters. At least you can say, though, that philosophers have usually tried to tell us what they think about philosophy. This you might suppose is the whole point. But not always. At some places and times, there have been philosophers who deliberately concealed their true opinions on philosophical topics. In some cases, they left clues or warnings for their readers to help those in the know see through the veil of confusion to the true doctrines underneath. How widespread a phenomenon is this? Well, that is itself a difficult question to answer. Certainly, if we fast forward to the modern era, we can think of philosophers who were pretty clearly atheists, or atheists by the standards of their day, who nonetheless professed faithful obedience to religious doctrine. Concerning the pre-modern era, though, even the suggestion of so-called dissimulation, that is concealing one's true doctrines, is apt to get historians fighting amongst themselves. One of the main instigators of these interpretive controversies has been Leo Strauss. In his 1952 book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss suggested that Maimonides, among other figures, can only be read rightly if dissimulation is at the forefront of the reader's mind. For Strauss, who was reacting to recent events in Europe, philosophy is, or at least ought to be, inherently subversive of entrenched political order. Thus, the proper philosopher will always be at risk of persecution from the reigning authority, and this will mean that he must, on occasion, cloak his true teachings. Strauss applied this reading to several thinkers we've already covered, including Plato and Al-Farabi, but it has been especially influential in the case of Maimonides. As we saw last time, Maimonides is the greatest of the medieval Jewish philosophers. So when it comes to reading him rightly, the stakes are pretty high. And one of the most influential ways of reading him is the one proposed by Leo Strauss, according to which one must read between the lines, and pay attention to pregnant silences in order to deliver the text's true meaning. I should perhaps put my cards on the table and say that I'm not very fond of Straussian readings. It seems to me a bad methodology to privilege what philosophers don't say above what they do say. Too much latitude is left to the historian to determine which remarks the philosopher might have been expected to make, but didn't. And when Straussian interpretive subtleties are applied to thinkers like Plato, it strains belief. Plato proposed things like putting women in charge of the ideal city, and sharing children and property equally among the ruling class. If these were the acceptable ideas he was willing to make public, what were the dangerous ideas he kept secret? The mind boggles. In the case of Maimonides, though, the Straussian reading has a bit more going for it, because of what Maimonides says himself. At the beginning of his greatest work, The Guide for the Perplexed, there is a passage that is itself pretty perplexing. Here, Maimonides cautions the reader that some care will need to be taken with the book. For instance, it may not provide all the premises necessary to reach some of the conclusions he will argue for. Or it may employ premises that Maimonides doesn't actually accept. This may be for pedagogical reasons. Also, some topics are so sensitive and advanced that they should be explained only among a select few, and not before the wider public. If we think back to Averroes's idea in his decisive treatise that exposure to philosophical arguments could endanger the necessary faith of simple believers, we'll get a sense of the threat that worries Maimonides here. These comments pretty obviously encourage a Straussian reading of The Guide. Admittedly, it is a bit strange that Maimonides is warning the reader in this clear and explicit way, if the point is to keep things secret, but it does put us on alert that The Guide may not offer to guide us along the straightest of paths. In this episode, I want to look at a kind of test case for this interpretation of Maimonides, the eternity of the created universe. We've already seen that this was a much debated issue in the Arabic philosophical tradition, with everyone from Al-Kindi to Avicenna and Al-Ghazali expressing a view, while drawing on arguments that go back to ancient figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Philoponus. Looking back over this history, Maimonides manages to reach a new, and rather modest position on the eternity of the universe. According to him, philosophy is simply incapable of deciding the issue. He's well aware that there have been many arguments for and against eternity, but after careful consideration, Maimonides finds that each argument can be countered with an effective response. This leaves us in a state of uncertainty, which can be dispelled only by recourse to the sacred Scriptures. They tell us that the world was in fact created, and is not eternal. Without this revealed information, we would never know for sure. But hang on a minute. This is the same Maimonides who encourages us to make full use of the allegorical and figurative readings of the Bible that were pioneered by Philo of Alexandria. As we saw last time, he tells us to take descriptions of God in the Bible and reinterpret them in a way compatible with philosophical truth. If the Bible suggests that God has a body, we should just find an interpretation that removes this suggestion. So why not do the same with passages that seem to say the world was created with a first moment of time? Actually, matters are even more complicated. As Maimonides tells us, some of the ancient rabbis who commented on Scripture believed that the world as we see it was created from some kind of pre-existing material. The beginning of Genesis seems to say that before God made the world, there was only chaotic formlessness, tohu wa bohu. He then made heaven and earth. Did he make it out of this chaos? Some rabbis thought so. Others proposed that God used his own garments as a material for the heavens. Genesis also talks about the six days of creation. This suggests that at least time itself was already present so that God's creative process could unfold over the course of a whole week. Maimonides observes that these rabbinical interpretations of Genesis seem to agree with Plato's Timaeus, according to which the universe was created by a God out of eternal matter. All of this suggests that if Maimonides had wanted to read the Bible figuratively, as containing the hidden teaching that the universe is eternal, he would have had little trouble doing so. But he didn't. Why not? Here, opinions diverge. Some, inspired by the Straussian take on Maimonides, think that he in fact did think that the universe is eternal and that he just didn't want to say so. Again, why not? Well, Maimonides remarks that such a teaching would undermine the whole of the law, apparently because it would undercut our sense that God is a personal deity who intervenes in our world who can arbitrarily decide to create, to reward, to punish. It would make God a kind of automatic necessary cause like the one envisioned by Avicenna to say that the universe is eternal. How could such an impersonal God be the lawgiver who chose the Jewish people and gave them the promised land? On this reading, then, Maimonides is worried that Jews who are not philosophers would begin to doubt the law if they learned that the universe is actually eternal so he conceals the truth from them. But if he's concealing this belief, then how are we supposed to know that Maimonides believed it? Well, remember that he has warned us to read the Guide carefully, on the lookout for omitted or bogus premises. Our interpretive wits will need to be sharp when we get to the second part of the work in which Maimonides proves that God exists, that he is purely one and without a body. He announces that in order to prove these things, he will simply assume something false, only that the universe is eternal. This gives him the chance to use Aristotelian arguments for the existence of an immaterial first cause, arguments that presuppose the eternity of the universe. For instance, if the universe is eternal, and thus exists for an infinite time, it cannot be produced by something that is finite, but all bodies are finite, therefore the cause of the universe cannot be a body. Why would Maimonides argue in this way from a premise he doesn't even accept? This is a way of signaling to the more alert readers, the ones that have remembered the warnings at the beginning of the Guide, that the universe really is eternal? But this isn't the only way of reading the Guide. In fact, it isn't the way I myself would endorse. Rather, in my view, we should notice that Maimonides also says that if the physical universe is not eternal, then it is simply obvious that it has been caused by an immaterial first cause. After all, the cause existed before all bodies had been created, so clearly it is not a body. If he instead chooses to argue on the assumption of an eternal universe, he's deliberately choosing the more difficult path. If God's existence and immateriality can be shown even in this way, then it must really be proven beyond all doubt. This interpretation would take Maimonides at his word when he says that he assumes eternity for the sake of these proofs, and when he says that he doesn't in fact believe in the premise that is so assumed. Notice incidentally that on this reading, the strategy used by Maimonides is exactly the same as the one adopted by Ibn Tufayl, who likewise proved God's existence twice, both the easy way, assuming a created universe, and the hard way, assuming that the universe is eternal. This returns us to our earlier question though. The Bible seems to be susceptible to many readings, no less than Maimonides himself is. And Maimonides usually has little hesitation in reading the Bible to say whatever he thinks it must say in order to make it come out true. So if it is really true that reason cannot decide the eternity issue, why think that the Bible's description of creation settles the matter? I think one reason can be discerned from the surface meaning of the guide. He goes through numerous arguments in favor of the world's eternity and rejects them all. Typically, he says that these arguments make the mistake of assuming that the rules governing God's creation are the same as the rules that operate within the created world. Thus we see, for instance, that created causes need to operate on pre-existing material. A tailor can't make a suit without cloth to work with. This is what led people like Plato and the rabbis who gave those readings of Genesis described by Maimonides to assume that the whole universe is made out of some material that existed before it. But who says that God is like a tailor? To the contrary, the ability to create from nothing, ex nihilo as they say in the Latin tradition, is a distinctive feature of divine causation. If we have a hard time imagining this, it is because of our own limitations as humans. Maimonides is rather impatient with those who fail to understand this which puts him in a bit of a quandary. After all, some of the philosophers who upheld the eternity of the universe are great heroes of his. In particular, he is in the awkward position of claiming that all Aristotle's arguments for the world's eternity, which appear in works like The Physics and On the Heavens, are undermined by this rather simple mistake of putting God on a par with created causes. But Maimonides finds a way out. Exercising in some alert reading of his own, he finds places in Aristotle's works where Aristotle suggests that the eternity of the universe is a particularly intractable problem. In particular, there is a passage in Aristotle's work The Topics which says that the problem is a dialectical one. We are called to investigate it even though its difficulty seems to defy proof. Seizing on this rather convenient sentence, Maimonides insists that it shows Aristotle to have been well aware that he could not really prove the eternity of the world. If the issue is dialectical, all one can do is offer more or less persuasive arguments. The whole demonstration is like the Eleven of Diamonds, simply not on the cards. This is not to say, though, that Maimonides believes the issue to be perfectly balanced as far as reason is concerned. Actually, he is pretty convinced that the universe is not eternal, and he doesn't need Scripture to reach this conviction. He points out that there are many apparently permanent features of the universe that seem to be unnecessary. For instance, why are there exactly the number of stars we see in the night sky? Surely it would have been just as reasonable for God to create one or two more stars, or one or two less. When we consider this, we see that the universe was almost certainly fashioned by a God who was to some extent arbitrary in his choices about what to create. The caveat almost certainly is needed, because we cannot presume to look into the inner recesses of God's wisdom and know all that He knew in creating. But as far as we can tell, the world looks very much as if it was created by arbitrary, unconstrained divine will, rather than by a God who was following some kind of iron-clad law of necessity. It may not be immediately obvious why this is relevant to the eternity question. The connection is one we have seen before. In the Aristotelian tradition, it was assumed that anything eternal is necessary, and vice versa. If the number of stars in the world is exactly such and such, and if the world is eternal, then it was necessary that the number of stars was exactly such and such. But this seems absurd. It just strikes us as obvious that there could have been a few more stars, that this was a choice that was in God's power. In that case, the number of stars is not necessary, and hence, neither is it eternal. Here, Maimonides has very cleverly turned the age-old Aristotelian equation of necessity and eternity against Aristotle, or anyone else who asserts the eternity of the world. The world might turn out to be eternal after all, and hence necessary, but if so, there is an awful lot we don't understand about it, starting with the reason why the number of stars couldn't have been different. As clever as this is, Maimonides is walking a fine line. He wants to emphasize that these things could have been otherwise, which shows that they aren't eternal, but on the other hand, he doesn't want to say that God makes these choices just on a whim. Rather, Maimonides is after the idea that the world displays signs of both wisdom and volition. God does make choices, but the choices are purposeful, and have the outcome that the world is providentially ordered. This endangers Maimonides' position to some extent. A philosopher like Avicenna might say that God's creation is indeed necessary, and unnecessarily results in a providentially well-ordered world. To say that God could have made a different world by choosing differently is, from this point of view, tantamount to criticizing the choices God did make as being frivolous whims, rather than a working out of what must be the case if the best results are to be achieved. Here we see a tangle of problems that will reappear in modern European philosophy in such thinkers as Spinoza and Leibniz. It's no accident that Maimonides fastens on to features of the heavens above us when he is exploring the mysteries of God's creation. He believed that celestial motions provide one of the biggest challenges to Aristotelian science, in fact a challenge that had gone unmet. As you'll remember, Aristotle taught that the planets and fixed stars are embedded in spheres rotating around our earth. But observation of celestial motion had never really cohered with this picture. If you observe the planets night after night, you will not see them moving in a steady, stately fashion around the earth. Instead, you will see them slow down and speed up, acting like anything but a body embedded in a huge, transparent, revolving sphere, as Aristotle had claimed. As we saw many episodes ago, ancient astronomers like Ptolemy had proposed systems for the heavens which explained this, but these were at odds with Aristotle's picture. A Ptolemaic system still puts earth in the center, but also postulates spheres within spheres, so-called epicycles, to explain certain phenomena, and also the existence of eccentric spheres, that is, spheres whose center is not at the midpoint of the cosmos. These tensions plagued Maimonides as they plagued his contemporary Averroes. Maimonides concluded that celestial motion is simply beyond the power of the human mind to understand. While he accepted that the astronomical theories that came down to him were useful, he could not accept that their implied account of the physical makeup of the universe was correct. How for instance can we say that earth moves towards the center of the universe, but then say that some heavenly spheres are eccentric? Either the universe has a center point or it doesn't, and Maimonides understood the best science of his day to be having it both ways. He was right, of course. Some think that he made yet another brilliant move in response, by thinking of the scientific theories offered by his predecessors as merely instrumental in nature. That is, they would provide a kind of explanation and prediction that matches what we see, enabling us for example to forecast where a given star will be on a given night, but the theories would be only useful fictions, not descriptions of the situation as it really is. Although I hesitate to wade into the waters of subatomic physics, one might compare the way we sometimes think of electrons surrounding the nucleus of an atom in a cloud, and sometimes as being like orbiting planets. Neither picture quite captures what is going on, but both are useful. Perhaps it is appropriate that Maimonides, who has occasioned such controversy among his interpreters, was himself so open to the thought that our knowledge has its limits. We do not fully understand the cosmos around us, and still less do we understand the god who created that cosmos. In both cases, we select useful, yet potentially misleading, concepts to get a handle on something we wish we understood more fully. For Maimonides, wisdom frequently consists in realizing the pitfalls involved in using such concepts. The dangers of depicting god as a lion or as having a face, the misleading assertions made by Aristotelian physics once it strays above the more easily comprehensible territory of the world below the heavens. He offered to guide the perplexed, but often by telling us why we are perplexed in the first place, and cautioning us that our perplexity will never be fully dispelled in some cases. If that leaves you a bit unsatisfied, then you'll be relieved to know that next time we'll be turning to a guide of our own who can help us dispel any further perplexity about the great eagle. Join me next time for an interview with leading Maimonides scholar Sarah Stroumsa, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.