Maimonides on Ignorance
In the first chapters to The Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides makes many references to the ignorance of the “general populace” while he describes the mechanisms of enlightenment. Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known as Rambam or Maimonides, wrote this text in Judeo-Arabic, a vernacular language, in 12th century Al-Andalus, as a letter to his student. The Guide is very careful to clarify that knowledge of the truth is not for everyone. This point of contrast becomes instructive as to what the truth actually is. It is that thing which not everyone is qualified or capable of having, it is dangerous in the wrong hands, and is so strenuously complex that to grapple with that it is a matter of sheer strength as much as anything else to acquaint oneself with it. In the introduction, Maimonides writes:
“Some never see this light but grope in the dark. Of them it is said They know not, neither do they understand. They walk in darkness (Psalms 82:5). Truth, brilliant as it is, is hidden from them utterly, as it says: Even now they see not the light shining clearly in the heavens (Job 37:21). This is the general populace. We have no need to speak of them here in this work” (1.4b, new translation by Goodman and Lieberman)
Later on, Maimonides becomes more direct, and asserts that he is speaking about women and children, as well as ignorant or ill-equipped men. Of course, we know this gendered distinction to no longer be true in our day. This admission comes when he writes that “The Torah ‘speaks in human language,’ [...] because it is meant to be accessible and studied by young people, women, and ordinary folk without the capacity to understand things as they really are” (1.37a). Later, he articulates five reasons why theology cannot be taught at the beginning of education, but most only come after rigorous study of the sciences. The most compelling of these reasons to me is what Maimonides calls “natural disposition,” meaning that a person must have a calm temperament, the ability to not explode in emotion. These reasons are not necessarily warnings of bad things that might happen if a young or ignorant person studies the meaning of divinity, but more like natural limitations place upon us as humans, making it impossible to acquire knowledge of the divine if you don’t establish certain measures and habits of mind, increasing your capacity for difficult thinking. There’s a limit to what we know as humans, but the limit also changes with education and maturity over time.
Maimonides places a clear ethical value on learning and enlightenment: it is good to know the truth. This is the ethical assumption that seems to underlie all of the chapters. And yet, it is necessary that not everyone can receive the light in this way. Why is that? Maimonides also offers that when the truth is expressed, it can only be written “poetically or in riddles” (1.4b). This begs the question of what genre The Guide takes, since it is neither poetry nor particularly riddle-like. As for what this tells us about poetry and riddles, they are both genres that require interpretation, like prophetic speech according to Maimonides, and both poetry and riddles also have an interplay between the meaning of individual words and the meaning of the overall figure represented, much like words of scripture. In other words, writing truth requires a stylistic “obscurity and compression,” concealing the truth in the same motion by which we capture it in language (1.5a).
If these natural limits upon human understanding and upon expressing the truth are God’s will, then is it also God’s will that truth be not obvious, require obscurity, veil itself constantly? This seems to be a complicated interplay. It is God’s will both that the truth be indecipherable, and that humans put themselves through the crucible of learning and expansion to be able to come to awareness of that truth in greater measure.
Yiddish literature also makes frequent use of characters who exemplify ignorance. The Wise Men of Chelm would be the easiest example, a fictional town where everyone is totally foolish, a frequent subject of Eastern European folk tales. But there is also the schlamiel, the archetype of an ignorant or innocent protagonist who comes up against the cruelty of the world, and David Roskies describes the archetypal ba’al guf, literally “master of the body,” who is focused only on satisfying his body and his passions, physically, through wealth, or both. These types of characters arise for many reasons, often in an overarching or undertonal argument about civilizational enlightenment, since Jews writing Yiddish stories in the late 19th/early 20th century were thinking about the old shtetl way of life and how its ignorant ways fail to integrate into modernity and worldly knowledge.
It may at first seem that Maimonides’s exclusion of “the general populace” from the audience for his teaching is judgmental, or derisive. I think it is possible to even see it as a beautiful sentiment. The truth is rare in this world, because we do not often have the means and strength necessary to face truth. We cannot do battle against this fact. While we need not necessarily agree with the generalizations he makes about who can or cannot become familiar with truth, or even Maimonides’s claims about pedagogy and the order of what must be learned before religious learning, we can accept our own internal limits and how even the most learned people always come up against limitations. Another important insight from Maimonides’s first chapters is that there is a limit to reason. No matter how much we train, even for the lesser prophets and even for Moses himself, there is eventually an upper limit to our ability to cognize and express the divine. So ignorance is not necessarily a problem, but rather an attribute of how the truth spreads and reveals itself in our reality.
