This chapter serves as a preface to Maimonides’ discussions about the problem of evil.

He starts out by stating that it is only positive qualities which really ‘exist’, and negative qualities are simply the absence of those quantities. Thus, ‘motion’ exists and has to be produced, but ‘rest’ is like a default state that does “does not require any agent”. However, in common speech, we do say that “[he] who puts ou the light at night … has produced darkness, … although darkness [is a] negative property and requires no agent”. He finds a philological basis for this claim in Isaiah 45:7,”I form light and create darkness”; in this passage, Maimonides maintains, two different verbs are used for light and darkness. One has to make light, but one does not similarly make darkness because it is simply the absence of darkness; an agent has to bring about deprivation of light in order to ‘create’ darkness. Hence, “Only in this sense can non-existence be said to be produced by a certain action of an agent”.

It is now clear that … the action of an agent cannot be directly connected with a thing that does not exist: only indirectly is non-existence described as the result of the action of an agent, whilst in a direct manner an action can only influence a thing really in existence

We begin to get a feel for why Maimonides has laid down this conceptual framework when he states:

After this explanation you must recall to memory that, as has been proved, the [so-called] evils are evils only in relation to a certain thing, and that which is evil in reference to a certain existing thing, either includes the nonexistence of that thing or the non-existence of some of its good conditions. The proposition has therefore been laid down in the most general terms, “All evils are negations.”

Some examples he gives are illness, poverty, and ignorance, which are all “privations of properties”. Maimonides is confident that all evils are privations of some or the other positive property.

With this conceptual armory in hand, — i.e., the idea that only positive properties can be said to truly ‘exist’; negative ones don’t exist per se, but are privations of those properties; light exists, and darkness is its negation — he goes on to state with supreme confidence

After these propositions, it must be admitted as a fact that it cannot be said of God that He directly creates evil, or He has the direct intention to produce evil: this is impossible. His works are all perfectly good. He only produces existence, and all existence is good: whilst evils are of a negative character, and cannot be acted upon

In some sense, Maimonides has redefined ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in such a way that God is ontologically good by definition. However, evil does seem to exist in the world; how does Maimonides explain that?

Evil can only he attributed to Him … in so far as He produces the corporeal element such as it actually is: it is always connected with negatives, and is on that account the source of all destruction and all evil. Those beings that do not possess this corporeal element are not subject to destruction or evil: consequently the true work of God is all good, since it is existence. The book which enlightened the darkness of the world says therefore, “And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Even the existence of this corporeal element, low as it in reality is, because it is the source of death and all evils, is likewise good for the permanence of the Universe and the continuation of the order of things, so that one thing departs and the other succeeds.