Maimonides on the Sin of Adam

We saw how Maimonides understood the word “image”: man’s purpose is the intellect. In today’s terms, this view blurs the line between “good” and “right”. When we say a clock is “good”, we mean that it does its job well. But when we say a person is “good” because he does not steal and helps others, we mean something else entirely. Maimonides, by contrast, holds that a good person is one who has attained his purpose – the intellect.

The question

“A learned man raised with me, many years ago, a remarkable difficulty... From the plain sense of Scripture it appears that the original intention was for man to be like the other animals, without intellect and without thought... and when he rebelled, his rebellion necessarily brought him the greatest perfection of man... It is astonishing that his punishment for his rebellion was to be given a perfection he did not have, namely the intellect.”

In other words: the naive view sees Adam before the sin as a kind of “happy idiot” in the Garden of Eden, and after the sin he is punished with hard labor – but gains the intellect in return. What kind of punishment is that?

Maimonides’ answer

Maimonides replies: what Adam acquired from the Tree of Knowledge was not intellect (“intelligibles”, muskalot) but another kind of knowledge – aesthetic and social notions (“conventions”, mefursamot), what we would today call “culture”: fashion, manners, taste. These are social conventions with no connection to “truth”, so there is little point in discussing them. The intellect itself, by contrast, is always good – so the sin cannot really have “paid off”.

1. Is culture a burden? According to Maimonides – yes: the time and resources invested in clothing, food, poetry and theater could have been invested in developing the intellect.

2. Are there really only two categories – intellect and culture? Today we would almost instinctively add a third: morality. We see the moral order as something that does not derive from the intellect (but is a kind of axiom), and yet we are not prepared to say there is no point in discussing it.

What was Adam’s moral state before the sin? Could he have struck Eve without any pang of conscience? This is an open question, but it seems that Maimonides tries to attach the good character traits to the intellect: the purpose of the perfect man also includes what we today call “morality”, but the motive is entirely different. The “ethical” person is interested in others, whereas Maimonides’ “perfect man” is interested in his own development – except that, incidentally, this leads him to act with kindness.

Similarly, the “good” soldier in the eyes of many commanders is not always the ideal patriot, but the tough adventurer who seeks to prove himself. The two types may look identical from the outside, but the motive is utterly different.