By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Alfarabi. The Political Writings, Volume II: The Political Regime and Summary of Plato’s Laws. Translated and annotated by Charles E. Butterworth. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Butterworth’s splendid introduction to the first of these two texts provides the best introduction to Alfarabi’s metaphysics that one is likely to find. In briefly sketching the life of Alfarabi, he also draws attention to the often forgotten major centers of learning in the ancient world.
Known eventually in the Arabic world as “the Second Teacher,” after Aristotle, Alfarabi was born about AD 870, we are told, in either Farab, Kazakhstan or Faryab, Turkestan. As a young man he studied jurisprudence and music in Bukhara, and later Aristotle’s logical works with Christian monks in Syria, notably with Yuhanna Haylan. His study of metaphysics began when he followed courses taught by the famous Nestorian, Christian translator, and student of Aristotle, Matta ibn Yunus.
So introduced he left Baghdad for Constantinople to further his study of philosophy and Greek science, returning to Baghdad after eight years. Political upheavals in the Islamic world eventually forced him to flee first to Damascus and then to Egypt. He returned to Damascus a year before his death in 950.
The Political Regime begins with a detailed account of the universe seen from a more or less Neoplatonic perspective. That account reveals the universe to be thoroughly ordered, everything occurring within it part of an integrated whole. After a discussion of the first and secondary causes and of the agent intellect, there follows an explanation of how human beings fit into the cosmic order, and how political life allows them to fulfill their purpose, namely, human perfection and ultimate happiness.
He enumerates the reasons why human beings associate and discusses how civic life can be arranged to meet the highest human needs. He emphasizes the importance of religion for the unification of all citizens. Upon describing the ideal political arrangement, he allows that no regime adheres to the perfect order.
Alfarabi’s universe is a hierarchical one, a cosmos ordered by a set of six basic principles or sources.
Although the world has always existed, there is an ontological priority among these principles, one having priority over the others, though not in time. There is a first cause that is perfect in every respect, with nothing prior to it. It is distinct, complete, and one, without material. “It intellects its essence in itself.”
There are secondary causes, spiritual beings, beings that inform the heavens and the planets, and then there is the active intellect. These three orders of being are in no way corporeal. In mankind, by contrast, the soul or form is united to matter. Such is the cosmos. These principles are ordered, but not chronologically, given that the world has existed from all eternity.
The first cause is what ought to be revered or held to be divine. All else comes from it. There is nothing in the first cause that needs to give rise to other beings. “Rather, its existence is such that a flowing or emanating of existence from it brings about other things, not subsequent in time, but dependent in being.”
Following a discussion of the existence of the first and secondary causes, a third mode of existence is introduced, namely, that of the active intellect. As the sun gives light to vision, the active intellect aids the human intellect to grasp the intelligible. It draws the human intellect toward it, but in such a manner that it loses its corporeal attributes and becomes one with it, and remains in that state of unity.
From the perspective of natural hierarchy, the problem of democracy is that it aims at freedom and equality rather than human perfection. Calls for democratic or popular rule contribute nothing to human well-being.
One does not have to subscribe to Alfarabi’s cosmology to appreciate his political insight. His discussions of civic life, happiness, and education are time-transcending. In a section speaking of kinds of human associations, he recognizes that inhabitants of equal nature vary with respect to the way they are educated and the things to which they are disposed. Thus the function of a city’s ruler is to govern so as to tie the parts of a city to one another and give it consonance and to make a ranking such that its inhabitants assist one another.
No friend of democracy, Alfarabi defines the democratic city as one in which each of its inhabitants is unrestrained and left to do what he likes. Its inhabitants are equal to one another, and their traditional law is that no human being is superior to another in anything at all. Its inhabitants compose countless similar and dissimilar groups. The one who rules them does so only by the will of the ruled, and consequently his rule is subject to the passions of the ruled. If the democratic situation is examined closely, it turns out in truth that there is no ruler at all.
For the second of the texts, Summary of Plato’s Laws, Butterworth provides an insightful introduction to what is obviously a sympathetic commentary on one of Plato’s most important works. It may not be out of place to say that this volume, although not its intent, serves as an aid to understanding historical Islam.
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