Is There a Text in this Class?

In Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of the Forking Paths Ts’ui Pen, the narrator’s father, isolated himself in the Pavilion of Limpid Solitude, in the center of a garden, most intricately laid out, like a labyrinth, to write a book that was confused and indistinguishable from that labyrinth. The labyrinth is infinite, as it is cyclical, and its last page is identical with the first and goes on forever. Ts’ui Pen’s book contained contradictory chapters and in the mire of its perplexities left several possible forking paths.

The Crux Redux, Conjecture and Speculation

In a paper published in 2006, to which most participants in this Forum refer, I presented the crux interpretum as a springboard for a discussion of the proper methods for interpreting The Guide.¹ I offered my textual reading as “the most plausible hypothesis, which may be falsified by other evidence and reasoning.” A few readers said that it was merely a “conjecture,” implying that it was a surmise no better than any other.² In fact, every solution of a textual problem is a conjecture, as are scientific theories, and one is not as good or bad as another. What we need to avoid is speculation, which cannot be verified or refuted.

Here I wish to corroborate my conclusions on the basis of new texts, especially one from Galen on inference (Greek epideixis; Arabic istidlāl). Considering Galen’s importance for Maimonides’ philosophy, I refer to ideas of his on logic and epistemology relevant to Maimonides’ views on these subjects.³ The crux interpretum is subjected to a close contextual reading. A trajectory of rationalism is drawn from his Treatise on the Art of Logic to The Guide of the Perplexed, which transformed Judaism into a philosophic religion, a religion of reason. His kind of medieval rationalism took into account the limitations of human knowledge: We are in a dark night with lightning flashing intermittently. The Guide, Maimonides instructs us, was written with great precision, with everything in its place, layered with gold that is overlaid with silver filigree. Like Socrates and the ancient Sceptics, Maimonides was a Zetetic philosopher, a Seeker, who, when confronted by a clash of unproven opinions, leaves the gates of inquiry open.

The textus receptus of our interpretive crux in Guide 2:24 is not, as some say, “the original version” or “a pure version” of the text.⁴ Readers are naturally biased in favor of a received text, although here a strange trick has been played on us: the emended text in Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation is the one that became the received text for the vast majority of readers throughout the centuries. It reads: “And the general inference from it [the heaven] is that it indicates for us its Mover, but everything else concerning it is indeed something that human intellects cannot know.” The Judeo-Arabic text, as preserved in our editions, contains the true received text: “And the general inference from it, that it indicates for us its Mover, is indeed something which human intellects cannot know.” In a marginal note to his Hebrew translation, Ibn Tibbon suggested that this statement contradicts what Maimonides stated elsewhere in The Guide.

Textual criticism is an art as well as a science.⁵ It is the science of finding textual errors and the art of eliminating them. The art, which entails critical judgment, is a function of reason and common sense. A. E. Housman maintains that textual criticism cannot be taught: criticus nascitur, non fit.

I have used the Hebrew translation of Samuel Ibn Tibbon to reconstruct our crux interpretum in the received Judeo-Arabic text of Guide 2:24. The Judeo-Arabic text exhibits an anomaly that creates a puzzle. If a text has an unintended anomaly, we correct it by conjecture.⁶ The conjecture promotes inquiry and often moves it in the right direction. The test of whether a text is anomalous is (1) grammar, syntax and style; (2) appropriateness to context; and (3) coherence within the general viewpoint of the work. (None...