SOURCE: Parens, Joshua. “Alfarabi's Platonism.” In Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's “Laws,” pp. 17-27. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Parens considers to what degree al-Fārābī should be considered a Neoplatonist.]

This chapter treats the secondary literature on Alfarabi's corpus as a whole rather than just on the Summary, because there is only one substantive treatment of the Summary, namely, a brief article by Leo Strauss.¹ The purpose of this chapter, however, is to correct certain common and persistent misunderstandings of Alfarabi. In spite of the readily apparent anachronism involved, I will discuss the secondary literature on Alfarabi before that on the Laws, because the former provides easier access to insights that are of use in reading the latter. In particular, most of the literature on Alfarabi openly describes him as a Neoplatonist and thus as a metaphysical dogmatist. In contrast, the secondary literature on Plato is less explicit in identifying him as such a dogmatist.

To some extent the attribution of Neoplatonism to Alfarabi was to be expected because the example followed in scholarship on medieval Islamic philosophy was scholarship on medieval Christian philosophy. And Neoplatonism had served as the model for much of medieval Christian philosophy. Consequently, scholars of medieval Islamic philosophy were predisposed to view their subject also as essentially Neoplatonic. More specifically, medieval Christian philosophy since Augustine had come to view Plato through the eyes of the Neoplatonists, and consequently, scholars assumed that medieval Islamic philosophy viewed Plato through the same Neoplatonic lens.

The Neoplatonic character of most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship on Plato's political philosophy is far more difficult to detect, especially since the German scholarship that was initiated by Schleiermacher prided itself on forgoing the Renaissance reliance on Neoplatonic commentaries for understanding Plato. I will show that, in spite of its claims, a large portion of the modern scholarship on the Laws has failed to free itself from the Neoplatonic tradition. Finally, I have chosen to focus primarily on the tendency to view Plato and Alfarabi through a Neoplatonic lens because a major concern of this study is to demonstrate that neither Plato nor Alfarabi (nor Alfarabi's Plato) is a metaphysical dogmatist, as are the Neoplatonists. What appear to be their respective metaphysical dogmas are in fact their arts of kalâm.

1. ALFARABI AS METAPHYSICAL NEOPLATONIST

Those students of Alfarabi who treat him as a Neoplatonist are inspired, at least in part, by their familiarity with the importance of Neoplatonism for the medieval Christian tradition. The influence of Neoplatonism reached the Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas by way of Augustine, who frequently notes the kinship between the teaching of Christianity and the teaching of Neoplatonism.² Indeed, Augustine goes so far in his admiration of Neoplatonism as to admit that the only worthy opponent of Christian doctrine (or theology) is Neoplatonism.³ According to Augustine, Neoplatonism and Christianity shared a central doctrine in common: the belief that this world of appearances (including politics) mirrors or should mirror a superior metaphysical or divine order. More importantly for us, Augustine attributed this view not only to the Neoplatonists but also to Plato.⁴ As I will show, Alfarabi's Plato in no way subscribes to this view. At the same time, I will explain why Alfarabi waxes Neoplatonic in his emanationist theology in the opening sections of the Virtuous City and the Political Regime.⁵

In general, the secondary literature on Alfarabi regards his metaphysics as Neoplatonic.⁶ For my purposes, the single most important fact about Neoplatonists is their studied lack of concern for political or worldly affairs. This lack of concern is complemented by the undivided attention they pay to metaphysical matters, above all to metaphysica specialis or theology. The difficulty with characterizing Alfarabi as a Neoplatonist is that his attention to metaphysical matters is never undivided. He presents his own metaphysica specialis only in works whose leading subject matter is politics.⁷ Consequently, even if Alfarabi were a Neoplatonist as regards his metaphysics, he would not be an orthodox Neoplatonist. Certain aspects of his Neoplatonic heterodoxy are widely recognized in some of the secondary literature. The secondary literature, however, because of its roots in nineteenth-century German historical scholarship, understands its enterprise in such a way that heterodoxy is necessarily reduced to eclecticism. Alfarabi is thought to combine a Neoplatonic metaphysica specialis with a Platonic political philosophy, no matter how incompatible these elements might be.

The heterodoxy of Alfarabi's purported Neoplatonism should be taken seriously. It appears in works such as the Political Regime and the Virtuous City, in which Alfarabi presents a Neoplatonic theology and then a strikingly parallel description of the political order he envisions. In effect, the hierarchy that characterizes the virtuous regimes finds divine support in an equally hierarchical and orderly account of the divine beings. At first glance, his account of political things shares much with the view that would gain ascendancy four centuries later with Thomas Aquinas: The order that rules the heavens extends not only to the earth but to the human things. Or in the words of Majid Fakhry, for Alfarabi politics is “an extension or development of metaphysics or its highest manifestation, theology. …”⁸

Alfarabi's Summary, as a commentary on Plato, provides a useful counterpoint to the first impression left by the Political Regime and the Virtuous City. It confronts us with one massive fact: In Alfarabi's sole commentary on Plato, that is, in the context in which one would most expect him to view Plato through a Neoplatonic lens, there is not a trace of Neoplatonism.⁹ Alfarabi does not summarize the one passage of the Laws that could be an extraordinary vehicle for a Neoplatonist commentator, namely, the account of the astral gods given in bk. 10. Indeed, the gods are ever-present in the Laws in a manner unparalleled in the rest of the Platonic corpus, yet Alfarabi chooses to omit the most striking accounts of their role.

In his commentary on the Laws (and in his commentary on the Metaphysics) Alfarabi never recapitulates Plato's (or Aristotle's respective) proofs of god's existence—the very heart of metaphysica specialis and what came to be the very centerpiece of medieval Scholasticism. Alfarabi is profoundly silent about the theology of Plato in the Summary for the same reason he is silent about Aristotle's theology in the Book of Letters: Both of these commentaries are meant to convey the intention of their respective authors. Because their intentions were political rather than metaphysical, Alfarabi is silent about their theologies but describes their political import. In contrast, Alfarabi presents his own art of kalâm in the opening of the Political Regime and of the Virtuous City.¹⁰ In these works which he wrote under his own name—viz., in a highly exposed setting—Alfarabi presents his own criticisms and revisions of the regimes and laws adhered to in his own time. In such a context, these regimes and laws require the kind of theological defense Plato provided for his own revised regime in the Laws. Although in the Summary Alfarabi adapts Plato's regime in the Laws to his own time, he does so in a setting in which all divergences from the regimes of his own time and place can be dismissed as deviations deriving from the pagan Plato. Furthermore, he makes such adaptations primarily to make the teaching of the Laws accessible to his contemporaries rather than to serve as a political blueprint.

Even when Alfarabi does present his equivalent to the metaphysica specialis of Plato and Aristotle, his theology is intentionally presented in an even less demonstrative fashion than in their theologies. His various versions of this theology are, at best, descriptions of the divine order rather than attempts to provide rational proofs of God's existence. Far from making any effort to appear to present proofs, Alfarabi's method of argumentation can only be described as rhetorical. Perhaps Alfarabi, in reviewing the effect of Aristotle's and Plato's proofs of god's existence, arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to avoid even the appearance of presenting demonstrative proofs of God's existence.

There is no doubt that in the theological passages of the Political Regime and the Virtuous City, Alfarabi uses Neoplatonist imagery. What is at issue, however, is whether he uses this as imagery for political purposes (i.e., as rhetorical kalâm) or views it (as the Neoplatonists viewed similar but not identical teachings) as the truth (i.e., demonstrative metaphysica specialis). To see that Alfarabi uses such accounts merely as imagery, one need only recall the political context in which they appear. The parallels that exist between the metaphysical account and the account of political life in each case are obvious: The metaphysical world is said to be ruled by a self-sufficient unique being who rules absolutely over a hierarchal order; and the political world, in the best case, is said to be ruled by the philosopher-king who rules absolutely over a hierarchical order. The primary difference between these parallel accounts is that what is supposed to be necessarily the case in the first account is only so in the best case in the latter account. There is perhaps no more persuasive rhetorical argument for striving in the direction of the best case (philosophic rule) than a description of a necessary and therefore inevitable (theological or metaphysical) hierarchy. Thus, the metaphysical account is intended as a model or an analogy for the account of political life.

Alfarabi never attempts to use demonstrative arguments to prove that the city is ordered in the same way as is the metaphysical order. He only draws an analogy (a form of rhetorical argument) between the metaphysical order and the political order. There are obvious problems with this analogy, however. The city is the home of—and itself a product of—the arts that produce artificial rather than natural things. Any philosopher deserving of the name would not be willing to rest satisfied with the mere assumption that the city has the same order as that underlying the natural whole. Alfarabi's use of the imagery of metaphysics for political purposes is far removed from the medieval Christian “natural law” teaching articulated most clearly by Thomas Aquinas. This teaching assumes that the order underlying the natural whole as dictated by the “eternal law” extends itself to the political realm in the form of the “natural law” (Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae.91, 1 and 2).

Despite rhetorical appearances to the contrary, Alfarabi makes an inquiry into political things that makes no assumptions about the naturalness of political things. Indeed, he acknowledges that the human or political things are voluntary rather than necessary.¹¹ Like Plato and Aristotle, however, in his political works he frequently describes the natural whole as teleological and hierarchically ordered to persuade his readers that the city should possess a similar teleological and hierarchical order. In modernity, Spinoza engaged in a concerted effort to undermine the ancient claim that the natural whole has a teleological order, even though he affirmed the existence of a hierarchy of human ends. Ironically, the attack on teleology in the natural sciences led by degrees to a denial of the possibility that there is a hierarchy of human ends.¹² Perhaps, after all is said and done, Alfarabi's teleological metaphysical imagery is not such a bad way to persuade human beings of the reasonableness of his account of the best political order. Furthermore, perhaps his account of the metaphysical order, although not truly philosophical or rational, may constitute a substantially more rational account of the whole than that which is popularly accepted. Finally, by setting the metaphysical order above the political order, Alfarabi elevates the rank of inquiry into the order of nature in the eyes of those ambitious persons who might otherwise aspire to tyranny.

2. ALFARABI AS POLITICAL MIDDLE PLATONIST: RICHARD WALZER

Richard Walzer proposes a related but more refined interpretation of Alfarabi's corpus than the one I have just criticized. He recognizes the Neoplatonic character of Alfarabi's “metaphysics,” but he also detects an incompatibility between Plotinian Neoplatonic metaphysics and the amount of attention that Alfarabi lavishes on politics.¹³ He does not consider Alfarabi to be indebted in metaphysical questions (especially the possibility of emanation from the Active Intellect to the human intellect) to the “mystically minded” Neoplatonists of the Athenian Academy but rather to a “moderate Neoplatonist” of the sixth-century school of Alexandria.¹⁴ As far as politics is concerned, Walzer assigns Alfarabi's presumed debt in this area to a purported “Middle Platonist” predecessor. The best example he is able to supply of a Middle Platonist with Alfarabi's interest in politics is Cicero. There is no evidence, however, that Cicero's works reached the Arabic-speaking world by Alfarabi's time. Walzer attributes Alfarabi's interest in the question of the possibility of a nation encompassing the entire inhabited world, to his supposed Middle Platonic predecessor's having lived at the end of the Roman Empire.¹⁵ But as Ralph Lerner has suggested, Alfarabi's “‘great’ perfect political association … did not require the model of Rome or Persia but could have referred to the monotheistic universal religions whose claims seemed to supersede the statesmen's and philosophers' nomos.”¹⁶

Walzer's view is an improvement over those of his predecessors who viewed Alfarabi as a Plotinian Neoplatonist. He acknowledges that Plotinian Neoplatonism is incompatible with a substantive interest in political things. Nevertheless, he is compelled to have recourse to eclecticism to explain the uniqueness of Alfarabi's concern with political things in the medieval world of his time. Especially because Alfarabi lived in the Islamic world, Walzer believes he must have slavishly adopted one contemporary tradition or another in metaphysics and one tradition or another in political philosophy, even though we possess no traces of said traditions. Above all, Walzer is unwilling to entertain the possibility that Alfarabi chooses elements of, for example, Neoplatonic doctrines and manipulates them to achieve an effect. He views Alfarabi as enthralled to a confluence of traditions rather than as a master manipulator of them. On the one hand, Alfarabi must be indebted to some unidentified Middle Platonist who took a peculiarly political approach to Plato's Republic and Laws. On the other hand, he must be indebted to a moderate Neoplatonism in metaphysics that can somehow be reconciled with this political Platonism. Is it not possible that Alfarabi rediscovered the original meaning of Plato's political thought, after its having lain dormant for centuries? Could he not have understood things about Plato's thought that were lost on many of Plato's own disciples in the Academy after his death? Could he not have grasped something that the Christian world had neglected—something that lay dormant, so to speak, within its own breast? Perhaps Alfarabi was a thoroughgoing Platonist who merely made use of Neoplatonic imagery because changed religious conditions demanded it of him.

Let us take the example of an Alfarabian work, Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato, the Divine, and Aristotle, which no doubt contributed to Walzer's view that Alfarabi was a moderate Neoplatonist-Middle Platonist hybrid. According to Walzer, Alfarabi “[like] many Greek thinkers, … believed in the ultimate identity of Plato's and Aristotle's views. He based himself on Aristotle, as understood by the Greek commentators of late antiquity, in logic, natural science, psychology, metaphysics (these metaphysics however understood and developed on moderate Neoplatonic lines).”¹⁷ In the Harmonization, Alfarabi attempts to harmonize the opinions of Plato, the divine, and Aristotle by means of Neoplatonic mediation. He attempts to harmonize them, however, for a reason that should make it clear that his primary interest is not in the truth of what he says: The apparent disagreement between the philosophers has become a source of “doubt and suspicion.”¹⁸ Evidently, the dialectical theologians attempted to use the apparent divergence between the philosophers to raise doubts about the compatibility of such a teaching with the one true teaching, namely, Islam. To harmonize Plato, the divine, and Aristotle, Alfarabi makes recourse to a writing that we now know to be Neoplatonic, the Theology of Aristotle. Many scholars have assumed that Alfarabi failed to realize that this work is Neoplatonic rather than genuinely Aristotelian.¹⁹ In her article “A Re-examination of al-Fârâbî's Neoplatonism,” Miriam Galston adduces reasons for believing that, contrary to appearances, Alfarabi did not consider the Theology of Aristotle to be genuinely Aristotelian but realized that it was a Neoplatonic work. To begin with, Alfarabi makes no mention of the Theology or of its doctrines in his comprehensive treatment of the works of Aristotle in his Philosophy of Aristotle.²⁰ Galston also argues that the interest that the Aristotle of the Theology displays in ‘metaphysical questions’ is to be contrasted with the interests of the Aristotle of the Philosophy of Aristotle. In the latter text, Aristotle—like the Aristotle in the Book of Letters, Alfarabi's Plato in the Philosophy of Plato, and, I would argue, Alfarabi's Plato in the Summary—has almost nothing to say about “divine science.” Above all, he has nothing to say about the third part of “divine science,” i.e., the account of god and the separate intellects or the bodiless beings.²¹

One could argue that Alfarabi is practically silent about Aristotle's “true” Neoplatonic opinions concerning the bodiless beings in his Philosophy of Aristotle because he has already expressed his Neoplatonic understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics in the Harmonization and in his political writings. There are, at least, two considerations that argue against this interpretation. First, even a cursory logical analysis of the Harmonization and the Philosophy of Aristotle shows that the Harmonization is the far more rhetorical work; it aims to provide an apology for philosophy rather than an accurate presentation of the thought of a philosopher.²² Second, and this is a factor that Galston seems to have neglected, in the Harmonization Alfarabi harmonizes not the purported opinions of Aristotle and those of Plato but of Aristotle and Plato the divine.²³ As Galston mentions, “In the Harmonization [Alfarabi] notes that in several places in the Theology Aristotle supports the view that forms have an independent existence in a separate, divine world—a Platonic doctrine against which Aristotle presents repeated and strong objections in his other works.”²⁴ When we recall Alfarabi's silence in the Philosophy of Plato about the so-called theory of Ideas, it becomes obvious that Alfarabi is harmonizing a false Neoplatonic Aristotle not with an authentic Plato but with Plato the divine, whose authenticity is equally in doubt. As Galston suggests, precisely because the Harmonization does not treat the true philosophy of Aristotle (and, I would add, of Plato), we cannot determine on the basis of the Harmonization whether Alfarabi regards Plato's and Aristotle's views on metaphysics to be substantially different. To determine this, one would have to turn to Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Above all, this writing shows that Alfarabi does not regard Plato's and Aristotle's views on metaphysics as Neoplatonic or dogmatic in character.²⁵ As for the Harmonization, one is merely able to determine that Alfarabi intends to make it appear that Plato and Aristotle agree with one another and, perhaps more crucially, as Galston points out, with the opinions of revealed religion on metaphysical matters.²⁶ The most glaring evidence that one of the primary purposes of the Harmonization is to create a mere appearance of harmony between philosophy and revealed religion is his attempt to persuade the reader that Aristotle did not think that the world is eternal.²⁷

I have happened upon the reason why Alfarabi's “metaphysics” takes on a Neoplatonic character rather than, for example, the character of Aristotle's “theology” in bk. Lambda of the Metaphysics. Druart has argued that Alfarabi's emanationism is his innovation on Aristotle. She suggests that the primary mark of the innovation is that whereas Aristotle's Prime Mover is merely a principle of change, Alfarabi's First Cause is a principle of existence. Or put more elaborately, “Most of the attributes of al-Farabi's first cause are missing in Aristotle, since the prime mover is a final cause of motion but does not bestow being, oneness, and truth on any other being.”²⁸ I admit that this is an innovation; however, Alfarabi is compelled to afford God at a minimum the powers of an efficient cause in order to accommodate philosophy to revealed religion.²⁹

I have shown that, contrary to Walzer's view that Alfarabi is a passive recipient of a dogmatic (yet moderate!) Neoplatonism, he is a master manipulator of Neoplatonism. Furthermore, if he is in any sense a Middle Platonist, he is not a political Middle Platonist. Rather he may be a metaphysical Middle Platonist. And by this I do not mean that he reconciles Plato's metaphysical dogmatism with Aristotle's metaphysical dogmatism. On the contrary, Alfarabi seems to detect a nondogmatic approach to metaphysics not only in the thought of Plato but even in the thought of Aristotle. He harmonizes a Neoplatonic Aristotle with a Neoplatonic Plato only in the Harmonization, whose leading purpose is to harmonize philosophy with revealed religion.

3. ALFARABI AS POLITICAL ARISTOTELIAN: GALSTON'S POLITICS AND EXCELLENCE

Although Galston's large and closely argued work obviously deserves more attention than I can give it in this context,³⁰ no assessment of the secondary literature on Alfarabi, and in particular no assessment of Alfarabi's Platonism, can be made without addressing this ambitious piece of scholarship. One of the inexplicit but leading arguments of this book is that Alfarabi's political philosophy owes more to Aristotle than it does to Plato. At the same time, Galston graciously acknowledges her neglect of the Summary (p. 221).³¹ Furthermore, in light of this neglect, she acknowledges that a final understanding of Alfarabi's political philosophy is not yet at hand. Because the Summary is the sole commentary we have by Alfarabi on a Platonic or Aristotelian political work, I am justified in a study on the Summary in raising doubts about the purported Aristotelianism of Alfarabi's political philosophy.³² Galston's arguments for his Aristotelianism depend, above all, upon the importance she attributes to his Aphorisms. In the Aphorisms, he clearly draws material from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but—this is crucial—it is not a commentary on the Ethics.³³ The Aphorisms does not present Alfarabi's interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy so much as an imitation of his popular ethical teaching.

The first, and perhaps the boldest, step in Galston's attempt to disprove Alfarabi's Platonism is a methodological or interpretive one. Galston claims to have uncovered an as yet neglected and more correct method of reading Alfarabi. For the sake of convenience, I will call this method the “dialectical method.” According to this method, the reader is obligated to view all of Alfarabi's texts as a working out of various, often contradictory, “doctrines.” These “doctrines” and their “consequences” in each of Alfarabi's texts should be treated with “equal care” (pp. 51, 54). Indeed, the highest task of the reader is to compare the contradictory “doctrines” and their contradictory “consequences” with one another. Galston's hope is that by playing them off one another in dialectical fashion the reader might arrive at some insight as to which “doctrines” and “consequences” are demonstrative. Galston's method enables her to compare contradictory formulations in different Alfarabian texts. It also enables her to view the Alfarabian corpus as one whole in which the difference between parts (i.e., texts) is little more than the difference between opposing arguments that one might play off one another in one text. Consequently, she does not see it as her task to analyze each of his texts as if it were an integrated whole that must be understood as a whole before it is compared with his other texts. How can the reader, however, know beforehand that all of Alfarabi's “doctrines” and “consequences” are of equal rank? Are not different Alfarabian texts argued at different levels of logical rigor? (For instance, to take again perhaps the most revealing contrast within the corpus, it is useful to compare the Harmonization with the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.)

Galston contrasts her method with Leo Strauss's esoteric “method,” in which, according to her, a polarization between the surface and the depth is assumed as a matter of “conviction” (p. 51).³⁴ She fails to distinguish clearly between two distinct senses of the opposition between surface and depth. She focuses on the opposition Strauss draws between more and less exoteric works, since her dialectical method applies particularly to the comparison of different statements by Alfarabi in different texts, and she tends to neglect the opposition he draws between more and less esoteric statements within a given text (p. 51). She tends to neglect this latter sense because her method leads her to neglect the integrity of each Alfarabian text. In the name of understanding the whole Alfarabian corpus, she passes over what must surely be a preliminary task, namely, the understanding of each text as a whole. It is not surprising that Galston rejects Strauss's distinction between more and less exoteric works,³⁵ because her method appears to assume that the Alfarabian corpus is essentially homogeneous.

I will mention only one example of what results from neglecting to see each of Alfarabi's texts as an independent whole. In the third chapter in section C, entitled “The Ruling Types and Their Activities,” Galston compares the “divergent portraits of the supreme ruler” (p. 127) or the supreme ruler as seen from different “point[s] of view.” Do Alfarabi's different texts present different portraits of the same supreme ruler or of different supreme rulers? Can one compare Alfarabi's “supreme ruler without qualification” (identified with the philosopher-king) described in the Political Regime with the “supreme ruler” in the Aphorisms, or even with the “supreme ruler” in the Virtuous City, as if they were equivalent? But for the fact that Alfarabi adds the specification “without qualification” (a specification that Galston neglects in this section) to his identification of the “supreme ruler” in the Political Regime, we would be thrown back on a resource that Alfarabi constantly reminds us we must use, namely, the awareness that words have a multiplicity of connotations. We can determine what kind of “supreme ruler” Alfarabi is talking about only by first determining what kind of city (or cities) is under discussion in each writing. And the difference in kind between “supreme rulers” in Alfarabi's different writings is often not just a difference in “point of view” but of rank.

The most obvious indicator of Galston's tendency to homogenize Alfarabi's writings is the undue weight she gives to the Aphorisms and to its description of the supreme ruler. She uses the Aphorisms to bolster a quietly argued but crucial thesis of her book: Although the theoretical virtues are higher in rank than the practical, they are both equally indispensable for human happiness. Following Alfarabi, she does not mean by practical virtues the theoretical understanding of political things or political philosophy but rather the virtues of a human being experienced in political affairs (p. 94). I cannot agree that the practical virtues are, according to Alfarabi, equally indispensable for human happiness.

The audience of the Aphorisms, like that of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which it often seems to paraphrase, is potential statesmen. The aphoristic style of the Aphorisms is especially well suited to the potential statesman who is impatient with the long and at times laborious study demanded by philosophic inquiry. One of the main purposes of the Ethics is to teach the statesman to prefer both the moral political life and the philosophic life to the immoral political life, i.e., the life of the tyrant. Such a teaching achieves two things at once: a respect for the philosophic life and a willingness to avoid pursuing the pleasures of a tyrant's life. The undue weight that Galston gives to the Aphorisms is consonant with her relative neglect of the Platonic element in Alfarabi's political philosophy. What Galston finds troublesome in the thought of Plato and in the highest expressions of Alfarabi's political philosophy is that Plato never devoted as much effort as did Aristotle to proving the superiority of the moral political life to the immoral political life with respect to happiness (which is not to say that Socrates did not frequently offer myths in favor of this argument); Plato merely proved the superiority of the philosophic life to the immoral (and by implication the moral) political life with respect to happiness (cf. pp. 13-14). Ironically, Galston readily admits that even in the Aphorisms, where Alfarabi assigns the highest rank he ever assigns to moral virtue, Alfarabi stops short of Aristotle in the crucial respect: He omits the requirement that “actions … be chosen for their own sake to qualify as moral” (p. 172). In other words, moral actions are not ends but means. Why Galston goes on to assert that such a view of the morality of actions is incompatible with the thought of Plato (pp. 172-73) is unclear to me.

Briefly, let us consider what effect Galston's dialectical method has on her interpretation of what I have called Alfarabi's metaphysical imagery in the opening of the Political Regime (and the Virtuous City). Rather than attempt to determine what the unified purpose of the Political Regime is, she suggests that it be viewed as “a work that presents theoretical philosophy alongside political philosophy” (Galston's italics) (p. 181, n. 5). It is difficult to understand why Alfarabi would have presented the two “parts” of this writing as forming a seamless whole unless he intended them to be viewed as an integrated whole with a unified purpose. What is the difference between setting these parts of one writing alongside one another and setting two completely different Alfarabian texts alongside one another? If Galston's “dialectical method” of reading is to be followed, then we are left without any means of answering that question. Alfarabi is far too fine a writer to leave such questions open.

In conclusion, on the basis of the popular Aristotelianism of Alfarabi's Aphorisms we are left with doubts about the wisdom of dispensing with what has become the more generally accepted view that Alfarabi's political philosophy is Platonic. I have myself indulged in this chapter in a sampling of a wide variety of Alfarabian texts, thus coming close to falling into the trap I have accused Galston of falling into. After the secondary literature on the Laws is discussed in the next chapter, however, we will turn to a single Alfarabian text, the Summary, with the hope that through it we might gain at least a glimpse of the whole Alfarabian world.

Notes

1. Leo Strauss, “How Farabi Read Plato's Laws,” in What is Political Philosophy? Muhsin Mahdi's “Editio Princeps of Alfarabi's Compendium Legum Platonis” [Journal of Near Eastern Studies 20, no.1 (January 1961)] also deals in brief with the substance of the Summary.

2. To begin with, note that Augustine, following the usage of the Neoplatonists themselves, refers to them as “Platonists.” See City of God, bk. 8, chap. 12. By “Platonists,” Augustine means above all Plotinus and Porphyry. For the role of these two thinkers in Augustine's thought, see the chapter entitled “The Platonists” in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 88-100 and L. Grandgeorge, Saint Augustin et le neo-platonisme, vol. 8 in Sciences réligieuses (Paris: Bibliothèque de l'école des hautes études, 1896), 35 and 48; reprinted, Frankfurt: Unveränderter Nachdruck; 1967.

   For the kinship between Christianity and Neoplatonism, see Augustine, Confessions, bk. 7, chap. 9 and City of God, bk. 8, chaps. 9-11.

3. For Augustine's praise of the “Platonists,” see Confessions, bk. 7, chap. 20; bk. 8, chap. 2 and City of God, bk. 8, chaps. 4-8.

4. Of course, this view is usually derived from Socrates' use of the Ideas. From this it is inferred that Plato divides what is into a world of appearances and the true world of the Ideas. As I noted in the preface, far from accepting such a dichotomy as a Platonic doctrine, Alfarabi is silent about the Ideas in his account of Plato's philosophy. In contrast, the Neoplatonists made a quasi-religious doctrine out of this dichotomy. For evidence that Augustine viewed Plato, and not only the “Platonists,” as promoting this doctrine, see City of God, 8.11 end. Furthermore, Augustine shares the belief in this dichotomy and mirroring (See A. H. Armstrong, “St Augustine and Christian Platonism,” in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus [New York: Anchor Books, 1972], 3-17, esp. 11-12)—although he places greater emphasis on the impediments to bridging the gap between this world of appearances and the ideal otherworld than the “Platonists.”

   I am not alone in arguing that Augustine confuses Plato with the Neoplatonists. See L. Grandgeorge, Saint Augustin et le neo-platonisme, [Vol. 8 in Sciences réligieuses] 52-54.

5. See, for instance, Virtuous City, in Alfarabi's Perfect State, ed. Walzer, chap. 2, para. 2, pp. 94-97 and the Political Regime, in an unpublished English translation by Miriam Galston, 1 and in ed. Fauzi Najjar (Beirut: al-Maṭba‘ah al-kâthûlîkiyyah, 1964), 31-32.

   In a lecture on Alfarabi (delivered in October 1991), Muhsin Mahdi noted that although Alfarabi uses the Neoplatonic theory of emanation, in taking it over he modifies it in one crucial respect: The Neoplatonic God is beyond being and thus beyond the comprehension of the intellect; Alfarabi's God or First Cause is in all cases the highest intellect. Thus, Alfarabi's Neoplatonism is a “decapitated Neoplatonism” or Neoplatonism without the characteristically mystical God. Of course, it is the mysticism of the Neoplatonists proper that is at the root of their disdain for political things.

   It could be argued that the Christian tradition, especially Augustine, does not share this view of God with the Neoplatonists. Indeed, Augustine's God is the highest being, rather than beyond being (see City of God, bk. 12, chap. 2). More importantly, however, his God, like the One—and unlike Alfarabi's highest intellect—is mysterious (see Confessions, bk. 1, chap. 4).

6. For example, Majid Fakhry, “Al-Fârâbî,” in the chapter entitled “The Further Development of Islamic Neo-Platonism” in his A History of Islamic Philosophy, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1983), 107-28, esp. 116-18; B. Carra de Vaux, “Al-Fârâbî,” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed., vol. 2 (Leyden: E. J. Brill Ltd., 1927), 53-55, esp. 54; Abdurraḥmân Badawî, “Al-Fârâbî,” in Histoire de la philosophie en Islam (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1972), 478-575, esp. 538; and most recently, Thérèse-Anne Druart, “Al-Farabi and Emanationism,” in Studies in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John F. Wippel (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 23-43. For additional examples from other authors see Miriam Galston's, “A Re-examination of al-Fârâbî's Neoplatonism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15, no. 1 (January 1977): 14.

   For the notable exceptions to this consensus, whose lead I am following in this chapter, see Paul Kraus, “Plotin chez les Arabes. Remarques sur un nouveau fragment de la paraphrase des Ennéades,” Bulletin de l'Institut d'Egypte 23 (1941): 269-71; Muhsin Mahdi's “introduction, 1962 Edition” to his translation of Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), esp. 3-4 (note Mahdi's striking reminder that one of the philosophers' greatest opponents, al-Ghazâlî, recognized the inauthenticity of Alfarabi's supposed Neoplatonism); and Galston's “Re-examination.”

7. Contrast the Book of Letters, perhaps his most metaphysical work, in which he presents neither his nor Aristotle's metaphysica specialis.

8. Fakhry, History, 117.

9. As I will explain in chapter 4, there may be some basis for the speculation that Alfarabi wrote a commentary on the Republic that has not come down to us. There is not, however, any basis for such speculation about the Timaeus—the traditional vehicle for the Neoplatonic appropriation of Plato.

10. For the view that these passages present a (revised) religion rather than Alfarabi's metaphysics, see Kitâb al-millah wa-nuṣûṣ ukhrâ, ed. Mahdi (Arabic introduction), 12-13 cited in Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 201 n. 43, and Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Mahdi, “introduction, 1962 Edition,” 4.

11. See, for instance, Political Regime in ed. Lerner and Mahdi, 33-34 and in ed. Najjar, 72-73. Alfarabi treats the voluntary or volition, as Aristotle does, as desire guided by intellect. Cf. Thomas Aquinas's view of volition as something more than the equivalent of the Aristotelian desire for ends (Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae. 8, 2). More importantly, his view of volition or will is influenced profoundly by Christian tradition. Indeed, will is determined not only by knowledge but also by original sin (Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae. 83, 1 and 3). Although original sin is a Christian doctrine, its existence depends upon the view shared by all of the monotheistic traditions that human beings, being made in the image of God, possess a radical freedom of the will with respect to sin akin to God's freedom in creating the world out of nothing.

12. A further irony worth noting is the similarity, in spite of the more obvious opposition, between the conviction of the medieval natural law theorist, Thomas, that both nature and politics are teleological and the conviction of modern natural law theorists (such as Hobbes) that both nature and politics are nonteleological.

13. Richard Walzer, “Al-Fârâbî,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 2, pt. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965), 779-80.

14. Walzer, “Al-Fârâbî,” 779 and Alfarabi's Perfect State, 420.

15. Walzer, “Al-Fârâbî,” 779 and Perfect State, 424-26.

16. See Ralph Lerner, “Beating the Neoplatonic Bushes,” review of Alfarabi's Perfect State, by R. Walzer, Journal of Religion 67 (October 1987): 510-17, esp. 517. Also see Mahdi's “Al-Fârâbî's Imperfect State,” review of Alfarabi's Perfect State, by R. Walzer, Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 4 (1990): 696-705.

    Cf. Walzer's view with my discussion in the introduction of Kojève's proposal that Alfarabi's predecessors in political philosophy were Damascius, Sallustius, and the Emperor Julian rather than Plato.

    The most extensive contemporary treatment of the Middle Platonic tradition with which Alfarabi could have had contact—that is, the Greek rather than the Latin thread of the Middle Platonic tradition—is John M. Dillon's Middle Platonists (London: Duckworth, 1977). The most extensive treatment of the Latin tradition of Middle Platonism is Stephen Gersh's Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).

    I found no hint of a developed political philosophy among the authors discussed by Dillon other than Cicero (who, of course, is part of the Latin tradition of Middle Platonism). This is not surprising in light of Dillon's concern in his book with “a type of Platonism, heavily influenced by Pythagorean transcendentalism and number mysticism, which, rather than the Stoicizing materialism of Antiochus, is the foundation of Middle Platonism, in the sense in which that term is understood in this book” (Middle Platonists, 182-83). The political philosophy of Plato and of Alfarabi is, if anything, a response to or rejection of the madness of Pythagorean metaphysics (see Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, 186 n. 23).

17. See Walzer, “Al-Fârâbî,” 779.

18. Alfarabi, Harmonization, 1 in an unpublished translation by Fauzi Najjar supplied by Charles Butterworth in 1986.

19. See, for instance, B. Carra de Vaux, “Al-Fârâbî,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed., 2: 54.

20. Galston, “Re-examination,” 15. Oddly enough, Druart in “Al-Farabi and Emanationism,” 26 follows Galston in affirming Alfarabi's awareness that the Theology is not an authentic Aristotelian work, but, contrary to Galston, maintains that Alfarabi viewed it as supplying a necessary supplement to Aristotelian “metaphysics.” To justify such an interpretation, Druart must (1) deny that other texts in which Alfarabi uses such Neoplatonic imagery, such as the Virtuous City and Political Regime, are fundamentally political writings (and affirm that they are metaphysical writings) (esp., pp. 26 and 38) and (2) affirm that the Harmonization is as much a philosophic book as, for instance, the Book of Letters (p. 24). The former, I have already argued, is implausible, and the latter, I will argue, is implausible.

21. Galston, “Re-examination,” 17.

22. Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated (and introduced by) Mahdi, “introduction, 1962 Edition,” 4. Contrast Druart, who seems to think that although Alfarabi's emanationism is not Aristotelian, he intends it to be a replacement for Aristotelian metaphysics (“Emanationism,” 24).

23. Note that the Plato treated in the Summary is referred to by Alfarabi as “the wise” Plato (disc. 5.18[c] and conclusion). The scribe for the Leiden manuscript has mistakenly referred to Plato in his colophon to the Summary as the “divine Plato”—see Compendium Legum Platonis, ed. F. Gabrieli, p. 43, line 14 and in unpublished translation by Mahdi, 45.

24. Galston, “Re-examination,” 15.

25. Indeed, as a result of the above inquiry into the Book of Letters and in particular into what it reveals about Aristotle's purposes in writing his Metaphysics, I am inclined to acknowledge agreement between Plato and Aristotle on the crucial question of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. Contrast Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, revised and expanded edition with Strauss-Kojève correspondence (New York: Free Press, 1991), 277.

    I cannot, however, rule out the possibility that Alfarabi merely makes it appear that Aristotle agrees with Plato on the question of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge because the belief that metaphysical knowledge is possible is somehow inimical to Alfarabi's own (Platonic) political philosophy.

26. Galston, “Re-examination,” 31.

27. Alfarabi, Harmonization, trans. Najjar, 39. Contrast Maimonides, Guide, 2:15 [34a].

28. Druart, “Emanationism,” 28-29, 36-37.

29. Muhsin Mahdi, “Alfarabi against Philoponus,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 26, no. 4 (October 1967): 236-37 n. 9.

30. For additional, although by no means exhaustive, thoughts on Galston's account of Alfarabi, see my review essay on Politics and Excellence (as well as books by Stephen Torraco and Marvin Fox) in Joshua Parens, “Theory and Practice in Medieval Aristotelianism,” Polity 26 no. 2 (1993): 317-30. As the reference to Aristotle in the title of this essay implies, I take a different approach to her book in that essay from the one I take here.

31. All page numbers in this section refer to the pages of Miriam Galston's Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

32. On this point in particular, compare my review of Galston's book in Parens, “Theory and Practice,” 319-22.

33. Alfarabi is reported to have written such a commentary, but it has not survived. The report that we have about this commentary from Ibn Tufayl in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is, morally speaking, quite shocking. See Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, selections translated by George Atiyeh, in Lerner and Mahdi ed., 140 and Hayy Ben Yaqdhân, ed. Léon Gauthier, 2d ed. (Beirut: n.p., 1936), 13-14.

34. I believe that I have shown in my discussion of the introduction to the Summary that Alfarabi acknowledges the necessity of, and therefore is willing to follow the example of, Plato's esotericism. See the introduction to the present book.

    Galston gives some weight to the political purpose of Plato's and Alfarabi's esotericism and even reports Alfarabi's treatment of that purpose in the introduction (pp. 37-38). By making this purpose secondary, however, she enables herself to neglect its role in favor of what she considers to be the far more important pedagogical purpose, i.e., enabling students to discover the truth on their own (p. 52).

35. The tendency to reject the distinction between more and less exoteric works is particularly striking in an author who did such a fine job in her “Re-examination” of revealing the exoteric, that is to say, purely political, import of the Harmonization.