Q&A: Your article on intelligibles and conventions in Maimonides
Your article on intelligibles and conventions in Maimonides
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael,
During a discussion on Facebook today, one of the writers referred me to your article on intelligibles and conventions. Your analysis of Maimonides’ view on this matter surprised me מאוד. It seems to me that you ignored Maimonides’ explicit statements in several places and really “read into” Maimonides your own personal view. Let me explain.
I think we all agree that a straightforward reading of the text in Guide of the Perplexed, Part I, Chapter 2, shows that Maimonides distinguishes between an ideal state—the state before eating from the Tree of Knowledge—in which a person knows everything (including morality) in terms of absolute truth and falsehood, and the present human state, into which we sank after Eden, in which there are things a person knows in terms of truth and falsehood and things he knows only in terms of good and evil. What he knows in terms of truth and falsehood falls under the category of “intelligibles.” That is, one can arrive at them and prove them through reason. What he knows in terms of good and evil falls under the category of “conventions” (or “accepted beliefs”; I’ll explain that shortly), meaning that they cannot be proven by reason and are connected to how widely they are accepted among different cultures.
In your article you claim that the simple understanding that “morality” and “good and evil” fall under “conventions” is mistaken. How does that fit with the fact that in the first place where Maimonides mentions “conventions,” in the book Explanation of Logical Terms, he gives as an example of a convention: “that it is fitting to repay one who has done good to you by doing good to him.” In other words—morality.
Likewise, in the Ten Commandments there is a series of moral commands such as “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” and so on. What would Maimonides say? Are these intelligibles, conventions, or some other category? According to your account, he would have to say that these commandments are intelligibles—but Maimonides addresses this in Guide, Part II, Chapter 33. According to what he says there, only the first two commandments are intelligibles (“For these two principles, namely, the existence of God and His oneness, are grasped by human speculation. Whatever is known by demonstrative proof, the status of the prophet and the status of anyone else who knows it are the same with respect to it, with no superiority of one over the other, for these two principles were not known only through prophecy. The language of the Torah is: ‘You have been shown, to know’”). “But the rest of the commandments are of the class of conventions and accepted beliefs, not of the class of intelligibles.” Indeed, Maimonides thought that the prohibitions of theft and murder and the like—morality—belong to the conventions. He says this explicitly. (“Accepted beliefs” = things we received from an exceptionally trustworthy chosen person, and therefore there is no need to investigate them.)
The most puzzling part of your article for me was the sentence: “For example, in the sixth chapter of Eight Chapters he distinguishes between rational commandments and revelational ones. That is, the moral commandments are, in his view, part of reason.” But Maimonides says the opposite there! He divides them into two categories and refuses to call one of them “rational,” and mocks Saadia Gaon for calling them that, writing: “Some of our later sages, who were afflicted with the sickness of the theologians, called them ‘the rational commandments.’” More than that, let’s read how he describes the moral commandments: “Things universally regarded by all people as bad, such as bloodshed, theft, robbery, fraud, harming one who has not harmed you, repaying evil to one who has done good, dishonoring parents, and the like. These are the commandments about which the sages, peace be upon them, said: ‘Things which, had they not been written, would have been worthy of being written.’” And then Maimonides determines that it is not correct to divide them into rational and revelational commandments; rather, they should be divided into statutes and commandments (the latter being what some sages mistakenly called ‘rational’).
So it emerges that Maimonides explicitly says and explains that what we today call “morality,” that is, the realms of good and evil, belongs to conventions and not to intelligibles. Isn’t that so?
Answer
Let me begin by saying that the question of what Maimonides thought is not really that important in my view, because what matters is what is true and what is not, not what Maimonides intended. That is a question for historians or archaeologists.
And a second prefatory point: there are quite a few contradictions in Maimonides’ writings, so my comments refer to what he says in the Guide of the Perplexed. Other passages may perhaps contradict these statements of his, and I did not try here to build a complete picture. I’m not even sure there is such a picture. He may have changed his mind or used different terminology in different contexts. That happens elsewhere in his writings too. For example, compare the definition of love at the beginning of Chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance with what he says in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah.
Now to your points.
In general, without a deeper study, it seems to me that Maimonides uses “conventions” in different senses in different places. There are conventions in the sense that everyone knows them (as distinct from intelligibles, which require intellectual analysis), and there are conventions in the sense of conventions or social norms. I have no doubt that in Maimonides’ eyes the prohibitions of murder, theft, and honoring parents are not conventions in the social-norm sense. After all, he writes about the seven Noahide commandments that these are commandments “toward which reason inclines.” Is that a convention? How could the Holy One, blessed be He, come with a claim against Cain for murder, if there was not yet any convention that murder was forbidden?
If your intention is to argue that conventions are not social conventions, then we have no principled disagreement. But there, in the Guide of the Perplexed, I have no doubt that he is not speaking about morality. All his examples there come from the area of manners, not morality. He calls walking around naked “the most evident of the conventions.” Is that the clearest of the moral laws? What about the prohibition of murder? Theft?
In short, I disagree. But as I said, it is not really important to me to clarify Maimonides’ exact intention. I use the distinction written in the Guide of the Perplexed for my own purposes; I am not conducting research into his intentions.
All the best,