On the Importance of the World: Phenomenology in Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed*

The essay argues that Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed contains a kind of phenomenology centered on the ontological category of world. Rather than engaging standard debates, it examines how the text investigates not the existence of particular beings but the possibility of any being at all—the conditions under which anything first appears and a world of objects becomes possible. The guiding question is taken from Thoreau's Walden: why precisely these objects make a world. The essay stresses the importance of this ontological inquiry in Maimonides's work.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is incredibly complex and, after millennia, still subject to controversy. In what follows I do not explicitly engage all of the well-known (and well-worn) debates surrounding that text. The aims of this essay are instead to reveal inMaimonides a sort of “phenomenology”—a term that I will clarify shortly but that at the outset should be taken to signal the importance to Maimonides’s text of the ontological category of world. “Ontological” ought to be understood as the idea that what is under investigation is not the existence of any particular being but rather the possibility of any being, of anything whatsoever, of how anything is. And “world” ought to be understood not as the cataloging of any number—even a very great number—of objects but rather as a meditation on how any object at all first appears; that is, an investigation of the conditions of possibility for how we even come to have a world full of objects. One might think of the guiding question here as a question that Thoreau poses in Walden: “Why do precisely these objects which we beholdmake a world?” My guiding principle with respect to this question (and its related questions) is to stress that