The objectives of the Law (qasd al-shari’ah قصد الشريعة) are twofold: the well-being of the soul and the well-being of the body. By well-being of the soul, Maimonides means something very specific: “correct opinions (aaraa’ sahihah آراء صحيحة) according to their capacity”. By the well-being of the body, Maimonides means something quite general: not just bodily health, but also social health, i.e., “a proper management of the relations in which we live one to another”. Of these two, the well-being of the soul is the more important one, but the conditions for perfecting the well-being of our souls can only be created when the well-being of the body is guaranteed, “for a person that is suffering from great hunger, thirst, heat, or cold, cannot grasp an idea even if communicated by others, much less can he arrive at it by his own reasoning”.

The well-being of the body requires proper management of social relations because Maimonides believes, like a good Aristotelian, that man is a social animal (أن الإنسان مدني بالطبع), and his material needs cannot be satisfied by himself alone; he needs society, and society needs laws that prevent us from simply doing what we like.

The well-being of the soul consists in a perfection of knowledge. A man will attain this kind of perfection when knows all that it is possible for humans to know (يعلم كل ما في طاقة الإنسان ) about existent things (al-mawjudat الموجودات). This kind of perfection does not require any good works, good morals, or even actions; it is purely an intellectual good, arrived at through things like speculation (nazar نظر) and research (bahas بحث).

Even though the well-being of the soul is the more important goal, he concedes that most of Scripture is concerned with the secondary goal of the well-being of the body; it is the one that is “most carefully and most minutely” addressed in the Law.

Commentary “Secondly, it seeks to train us in faith, and to impart correct and true opinions when the intellect is sufficiently developed”. What does it mean to ‘train us in faith’? The whole edifice of human knowledge rests on axioms and definitions, which ground our knowledge in, essentially, faith in some simple statements that everybody agrees to assent to. Once you have set up your definitions and the necessary minimum set of axioms, then – and only then – can we make statements with any certainty. The certainty that we have about the laws of physics, for example, hinges on some implicit assumptions, taken as axiomatic, such as the principle of sufficient reason, or the idea that the world exhibits order rather than randomness. The certainty that we have about mathematical truths, likewise, rests on the axioms and definitions that must precede any true statement in mathematics; at least some of those axioms must be truly axiomatic, i.e., must be taken on faith. This practice of taking some starting principles ‘on faith’ and then working out, using our logical faculties, the necessary and true consequences of those starting principles, is indispensable to the practice of Science and is the only way to achieve any kind of certainty in the world. For Maimonides, it seems, Scripture gives us practice in this way of looking at things: it teaches us to have faith in a certain set of ground rules upon which we can use our reason to build.

Would Maimonides have acknowledged the equivalence of many different ‘ways of looking at the world’, i.e., many different sets of starting principles? Probably not, but the germ seems to be present in his thought nevertheless, especially given what he says in chapter 28 about some of the beliefs taught in Scripture.