Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 130 - State of Mind - al-Farabi on Religion and Politics.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, State of Mind, Al-Farabi on Religion and Politics. If you were going to compare the leaders of your nation to a part of the body, which part would you choose? The fingers, perhaps, since they deftly remove money from your wallet? The skin, because they are so superficial? The tongue, because all they want is a taste of power? Or maybe you can think of an even less favorable comparison, which might bring a whole new meaning to the phrase seat of power. Let's not be cynical though. Most politicians probably mean well, and some even do well. A good leader can be the face of the nation, representing its people to the world, and also its brain, thinking through the issues that confront it. Al-Farabi would broadly agree with this last comparison, except that he would instead refer us to the heart. Not because his ideal ruler would constantly administer beatings. Rather because he follows Aristotle in believing that the so-called ruling faculty of the human body is located in the heart, and not the brain. He even wrote a little treatise answering Galen's criticisms of Aristotle on this point. So, when Al-Farabi frequently compares the well-run society to a healthy human body, he has it in mind that the presence of an effective ruler prevents the city from being heartless, rather than brainless. Al-Farabi takes this comparison between the city and the body so seriously that he also sometimes compares the good ruler to a doctor. As the doctor uses the medical art to impose good order on the body, so the ruler imposes good order on the citizens under his rule. Finding a point of agreement between Aristotle and Galen, Al-Farabi says that in both cases, the goal is a kind of balance or moderation. In Galen's medical theory, the doctor seeks to balance the four humours in the patient's body. And in Aristotle's ethical theory, each of us should be aiming for a balance, what we once upon a time called the Goldilocks theory of ethics, with each virtue defined as a mean between extremes. Al-Farabi also follows Aristotle in thinking that good political rule can help citizens to be happy by bringing them to virtue. In fact, he goes so far as to say that happiness is impossible for anyone who does not live in a well-run society. We can see how deeply Al-Farabi is influenced by ancient writings about politics by considering what sort of society he has in mind. He lived in the enormous empire ruled by the Abbasids, yet unhesitatingly took the individual city to be the fundamental setting for political affairs. His writings about the best arrangement of a society are political in the most etymological of senses. Like Plato and Aristotle, he is talking about the affairs of a city, or polis. This etymology works in Arabic too. The term often translated political in Al-Farabi, madani, has the same root as the word madina, meaning city. Nearly every page of his writings on political subjects betray the influence of Aristotle and above all, Plato. Though there was no complete Arabic translation of the Republic, Al-Farabi clearly knows the broad outlines of its argument, probably through an abbreviated paraphrase version. As we'll see, he adopts its teaching that a city can become good only if it is ruled by philosophers. He also recognizes the possibility that an entire city be virtuous, just as a person can be. A virtuous city is one in which the citizens, with the help of their ruler, have attained the right opinions and performed the right actions. By contrast, ignorant cities are full of people doing the wrong things because they hold the wrong opinions. Echoing Plato's Republic yet again, he speaks of ignorant cities that pursue honor, wealth, or pleasure, rather than genuine happiness. Notice that Al-Farabi speaks in terms of the opinions rather than the knowledge that should ideally be possessed by citizens. This thought even appears in the title of his work Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City. He finds it unrealistic or even impossible to expect that all the inhabitants will have real knowledge. As we saw last time, his conception of knowledge follows the highly demanding constraints laid down by Aristotle. Truly to know something, you must have possession of necessary and universal truths reached through valid demonstrations. This goal is so demanding, and talent and opportunity so scarce, that only a few people can hope to possess genuine knowledge. In fact, Al-Farabi thinks it is rather optimistic to suppose that anyone in a city will really have complete knowledge of all the truths that are merely believed by the inhabitants of the virtuous city. They need to have true opinions about God as the source of all truth and perfection in the world, about the heavenly bodies and the intellects that move them, the formation of mankind, the right arrangement of political affairs, and the afterlife. These are pretty well the topics Al-Farabi covers in on the opinions of the inhabitants of the virtuous city, and the topics we're dealing with in this and the previous podcast. In the absence of podcasts, though, the citizens of the virtuous city are going to need some other source of help. In the best case scenario, they will get their opinions from someone who knows, namely the true ruler or king, of the city. As in Plato, he will be not just a king, but also a philosopher. His intellect will be completely realized by receiving an emanation, not from the internet as with a podcast, but from the separate active intellect. Since the ideal ruler knows everything anyone might need to know, he can help his subjects to form virtuous opinions. And lest we forget, he will also need to help them perform virtuous actions. Without his guidance, the citizens will lack the right goals because of the false opinions they have regarding practical affairs. Following late ancient classifications of knowledge, Al-Farabi divides up philosophy into theoretical and practical. For him, the practical is defined as the sphere of the voluntary, so practical philosophy is relevant wherever choices must be made. Since it is a kind of philosophy, it will involve the grasp of necessary, universal truths. So on the practical front, what the philosopher, and hence the perfect ruler, possesses is general knowledge about practical affairs. This allows him to establish the right goals to be pursued by the citizens. They should pursue true happiness, as opposed to wealth, honor, or pleasure, for instance. They will need more help than that, though. As Al-Farabi points out, it isn't enough to have the right goal if one can't deliberate well about how to attain that goal. This amounts to seeing how the general deliverances of reason can be applied to practical affairs in detail and in individual cases. So the perfect ruler will need this capacity too. Again, Al-Farabi compares the ruler to the doctor. Galen had emphasized that good doctors do not just know generalities about medicine, they are also able to draw on their experience to tailor remedies to the needs and bodies of individual patients. In the same way, ethical virtue and the virtuous rule of cities means being able to judge each case in light of previous experience. As becomes especially clear in a work by Al-Farabi called The Book of Religion, the practical abilities of the ideal ruler are realized above all in the handing down of laws. We just saw that the ruler has to keep an eye on both universal goals and individual cases. His laws represent an application of the general to the particular, in a way appropriate for the city and its inhabitants. After all, each given city would have special needs because of its location, its climate, and the temperament of its people. The ruler will understand all this, and legislate accordingly. He will also be able to react appropriately as new situations arise. The ruler's law-giving function may seem a distinctively Islamic feature of Al-Farabi's theory, and as we'll see in a moment there is some truth in that, but Plato too discussed the philosophical basis of laws several times, not just in the Republic, but also in his final work The Laws. Plato's laws would have been known to Al-Farabi, probably in the form of another paraphrase by Galen. So far then, the Farabian political theory looks to be a subtle reworking and interweaving of themes from Plato and Aristotle, along with analogies drawn to Galenic medicine. All this sets the scene for Al-Farabi's most dramatic contribution to the history of political philosophy, his claim that the ideal ruler is not only a philosopher, but also a prophet. We saw last time that Al-Farabi makes God a rather remote first principle who affects humans through a chain of intermediary celestial intellects. This provides the context for Al-Farabi's theory of prophecy. The act of intellect which provides knowledge to individual human knowers is also the conduit through which God gives a revelation to the prophet. It will be this revelation that distinguishes the best possible ruler from a mere philosopher. The philosopher has perfectly realized the human capacity for knowledge, which is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it leaves no room to say that the prophet is intellectually superior to the philosopher. The two are alike in having all the universal knowledge that any human could possess, a state that Al-Farabi refers to as acquired intellect. Instead, what distinguishes the prophet from the philosopher occurs in a lower part of the soul, the imagination. What the prophet receives in revelation comes in the form of symbolic images. He may, for instance, have visions of what is to come in the future. Here, Al-Farabi is in broad agreement with his predecessor Al-Kindi, who wrote a work on prophetic dreams. According to Al-Kindi, a sleeping person's soul can receive images from the intellect into the imagination. These images may in some cases be like riddles which need to be decoded. For instance, Al-Kindi says that a dream about flying might signify that a voyage is in your near future. To some extent, these ideas about God-given prophetic visions were already worked into the Arabic translation of Aristotle's writings about dreams. So Al-Farabi is drawing on Arabic literature of the previous century here. Still, he does something new by seeing the possible implications for religion and political affairs. Thanks to the symbolic images the prophet received from God through the act of intellect, he is able not just to foretell the future, but also to represent what he knows in a way that his subjects can appreciate. For this purpose, the prophet's revelation takes the form of images and symbols, not demonstrative proofs. As we saw, Al-Farabi thinks that the citizens of the virtuous city need to have a whole range of beliefs about God, celestial intelligences, the afterlife, and so on. They do not need a philosophical understanding of any of these matters, they just need to be convinced. So it's fine if their opinions rest on the literal acceptance of symbols. The citizens might, for instance, believe in celestial intelligences but think of them as angels. For instance, in Islam, it is said to be the angel Gabriel who delivered the revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad. For Al-Farabi, the angel would be a symbol of the act of intellect in its role as the intermediary between God and the prophet's soul. Similarly, the bliss attained by souls freed from body is presented in Islam as a garden of delights, a material symbol of the immaterial bliss that awaits the virtuous soul once it is freed from the body. I should hasten to add that these are my examples, not Al-Farabi's. In fact, his discussions of religion studiously avoid any explicit allusions to Islam or any other actual faith. He always addresses the topic in abstract and general terms. But it's pretty clear that when he describes the ideal prophet-philosopher-ruler who brings a revealed religion, he is thinking of Muhammad as a primary example. The prophet-ruler is also a lawgiver, which should put us in mind of Islamic law and its basis in Muhammad's revelation and teachings. Al-Farabi's book of religion strongly suggests this when it addresses the question of what the virtuous society should do when the prophet-ruler is no longer alive. Ideally, he would be replaced by another such ruler, or failing that, a group of people who collectively have the traits the prophet-ruler combines in his single and singular person. When the gifts of universal understanding, excellence in deliberation about particulars, and revelation are possessed by no individual or group of leaders, the citizens must adhere to the laws previously laid down by the perfect ruler or rulers. Mostly this just means following the letter of the laws as closely as possible. But circumstances change, and problems may arise that have no clear solution in the existing law. When this happens, Al-Farabi says, we must turn to jurisprudence. This art extends the legal rulings of the prophet to new questions and situations, and is grounded in a thorough study of the prophet and his legal judgments. To some extent, we find, again, these ideas prefigured in Plato, since he also raises the question of what to do in generations following an ideal lawgiver's death. But the details of Al-Farabi's discussion here leave little doubt that he has in mind Islamic jurisprudence, which in Arabic was called fiqh. It's a topic to which we will return in future podcasts. It's fascinating to see how Al-Farabi makes a place in his political theory for jurisprudence, which in his day had become a considerable social and political force in Muslim society. Al-Farabi's attitude towards the jurists might best be described as condescending but tolerant. He explains why fiqh is necessary, but it clearly plays a much less exalted role than philosophy. After all, philosophy gives us a way to understand for ourselves the true basis of the prophet ruler's laws, the truths that lie behind the merely symbolic images offered in a text like the Qur'an. What jurisprudence does, by contrast, is to stay within the legal framework and symbolic world of a religion. The jurist makes careful guesses about how best to extend these teachings without probing into their actual foundations. In this sense, the jurist never ventures beyond the parochial confines of his own religion. As several scholars have pointed out, one can draw an analogy here to the discipline of grammar, which we looked at in the episode on the Baghdad school. As we saw, for Al-Farabi and the other Baghdad Aristotelians, grammar is culturally specific because it is tied to the language of a single people, whereas logic is universal and uncovers the structure of human reason itself. Likewise, religion and the religious law are bound to one culture, inducing true opinions and laying down injunctions in a way tailored to that culture. A jurist thinks of this culturally specific material as if it were universal, absolutely true revelation, just as the grammarian thinks he can get at truth merely by studying the language he happens to speak. Ironically, a similar accusation is sometimes thrown at today's analytic philosophers, who occasionally seem to think that we can do philosophy by studying language, and that English is the only language that exists. Human philosophy, by contrast, is ostentatiously and explicitly universal. Every prophet-ruler and every philosopher understands the same truths, for instance, the oneness of God as first principle, the descent of his providential influence through the heavens and celestial intellects, and so on. These same truths are symbolized in different ways by different prophetic revelations, which Al-Farabi calls virtuous religions. So, Al-Farabi puts both jurisprudence and grammar, firmly and literally, in their place. They play a useful role but are limited to these perspectives of the here and now, a limitation usually ignored by the jurists and grammarians themselves. Regarding a third intellectual tradition which was also blossoming in his day, he is still more dismissive. This is rational theology, or kalam. In principle, Al-Farabi leaves an opening for kalam to play a similarly limited, but still useful, role. He associates theology with dialectic, which is the practice of arguing from agreed premises rather than offering demonstrations that can be traced back to solid first principles. And he admits that dialectic can be of great use, for instance to defend a virtuous religion from its detractors. In practice, though, he thinks that the practitioners of religious dialectic in his own society are like what comes next after your spouse says, honey, we need to talk. Seriously bad news. In a rather amusing discussion of theology in his work The Enumeration of the Sciences, Al-Farabi lists the different kinds of theologian, or practitioners of kalam. None of them are conscious of the dialectical nature of their enterprise and the modesty of its aims in comparison to the demonstrative majesty of philosophy. Instead, some theologians are of the view that even the most advanced human will be as a child compared to God. For these theologians, there is no point using human reason to guess at the truths underlying God's message, or even to ratify those truths. Instead, we should accept the prophet's veracity on the basis of the miracles he performed, and take his revelation at face value. Other theologians are more troubled by the surface meaning of revelation and try to eliminate its apparent implausibilities. Here Al-Farabi might be thinking, for instance, of passages in revealed texts that depict God as a physical being. These more skeptical theologians turn to sense perception, reason, and tradition, and assimilate the message of the prophet to the deliverances of these three sources. Notice this is almost exactly what we found inside Iagān. No surprise there, since Al-Farabi apparently has in mind the Muʿtazilite theologians who so deeply influenced Zādīyā. Next, there are some theologians who are just interested in interreligious debate. They content themselves with pointing out implausibilities in other religions, to distract opponents from the implausibilities of their own faith. Still others will stoop to mendacious tricks to win in debates with members of other religions. This is no-holds-barred dialectic, which Al-Farabi compares to the fact that all is fair in war, if not in love. It seems clear that these scheming deceivers are the most despicable representatives of kalam, but all the groups described here are subject at least to self-deception even if they don't deliberately deceive others, and none of them can hope to attain knowledge as the philosopher does. Actually, looking back now over the last two episodes, it strikes me that one central theme if not the central theme of Al-Farabi's philosophy has been knowledge. For this reason, I would like to take a closer look at this theme of knowledge, not only in Al-Farabi, but also looking ahead to what we will find in the great Avicenna. Demonstrate your faith in the podcast by joining me for an interview on these topics with Deborah Black. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.