Q&A: What Does “The Nature of the Possible” Mean?
What Does “The Nature of the Possible” Mean?
Question
Maimonides, in Guide for the Perplexed III:17, holds that what happens to animals is accidental and not individually supervised, arguing that otherwise “the nature of the possible” would be negated. Does he mean that natural events occur spontaneously and independently, without a causative cause, and that there are always two possibilities in them? Does Maimonides reject Laplace’s claim that every given state of the world necessarily predicts all the states before it and after it?
Answer
I’m not well-versed in the Guide for the Perplexed and I haven’t checked, but perhaps he means to say that this operates by way of nature and without divine intervention; otherwise there would be no nature. “The possible” here means whatever nature dictates. But it may be that in his view there really are lacunae in the laws of nature. That is certainly what the Sages thought, as I showed from the Talmudic passage in Berakhot about praying over something that has already happened. It seems to me that determinism in the laws of nature was not accepted then.
Discussion on Answer
So then what is “the nature of the possible” in his words? That doesn’t sound plausible.
Maimonides’ major principle is that individual providence follows intellect. So even within the human species itself, some individuals are more supervised and some less, each one “according to the measure of intellect that reaches him.”
So this whole way the questioner understands it—as connected to chance and possibility—is not clear to me.
They are supervised in the sense of reward and punishment. Suffering comes upon a person according to what is fitting for him. But with an animal, which is not a human being, there is no meaning to “what is fitting for it.”