Rabbi Joshua Maroof wrote:

Can you explain why the Rambam distinguishes between knowledge of emet v'sheqer on one hand, and the knowledge of "tov vera" or "mefursamot" pursued after the sin of eating the fruit? Why is inquiry into the tov and ra, conventional morality and propriety, etc., associated with involvement in pleasures?

A universal principle is applicable to a certain framework of objects. In the most general sense these objects can be divided into theoretical and practical ones. The theoretical ones are true, which is to say applicable to things per se not as instruments or human possessions (Alfarabi, principles of existing things). Practical principles are applicable only to the framework of human interaction with the environment insofar as it is in fact instrumental to man.

The mind that is free and actual, cares about principles per se as they are in the world, as in naming animals. Such a one cares about the potential to express principles per se. The mind that is preoccupied with itself focuses on the practical human environment, in a sense imprisoning itself in a limited framework. This is the world of tov vara ie which ignores principles per se only caring about understanding of the potential of things to be used by man. The immature man, the one who eats of the fruit of the tree, whether it be grape, sweet fig or wheat chooses to preoccupy itself with the fantasy of an independent framework of human instrumentality and hide from the reality that man is but a subsystem of creation. This is hiding from G.

It is this point which the story of the chet brings out. Adam obviously could have Mitzva before the chet- he had one. Having a Mitzva, however, is not the same as morality or the realm of good and evil - the "apparent truths" as Rambam calls them.

This faculty Adam possessed perfectly and completely. The right and the wrong are terms employed in the science of apparent truths (morals), not in that of necessary truths, as, e.g., it is not correct to say, in reference to the proposition "the heavens are spherical," it is "good" or to declare the assertion that "the earth is flat" to be "bad": but we say of the one it is true, of the other it is false. Similarly our language expresses the idea of true and false by the terms emet and sheker, of the morally right and the morally wrong, by tob and ra'.

It seems from Rambam that pre chet Adam was capable of a Mitzva that was a necessary truth -an Emes. What kind of Mitzva is a necessary truth, like the heavens being spherical rather than morally right ? If we look at the Mitzva that Adam , in fact , was given we see it was exactly of this sort-true rather than good. It was due to Man's essential nature that this Mitzva was given. Man, as a mind , is an entity involved in thought about eternal truths as in naming animals that are eternally reflections of genetics. Man is not an entity that occupies himself with facts useful only for an animal pleasure. It is in this sense, I think, that Chazal say the tree was a grape vine. To occupy oneself with intricate details of wine and notes etc is to lose ones essence as a mind seeking eternal truths- on that day you shall surely die. The pre chet Mitzva was then itself an eternal truth, a direct inference that limiting oneself to preoccupation with pleasurable facts is in truth eternally contradictory to man's own eternal essence as a rational animal.