Al-Farabi

← Encyclopedia

Al-Farabi (Abu Nasr al-Farabi, c. 872–950; Latin Alpharabius) was a philosopher of the eastern Islamic world whose synthesis of Greek thought set the agenda for philosophy in Arabic for centuries after him. Later tradition called him the Second Teacher — the first being Aristotle — and the title fixes his reputation precisely: the man who, more than anyone before Avicenna, made the inherited Greek corpus into a working system in a new language and a new faith.

The biographical record is thin and partly legendary. He is reported to have come from Farab in Transoxiana, to have worked in Baghdad among the Christian scholars who were then translating Aristotle into Arabic, and to have died in Damascus. The Baghdad in which he learned his logic was the world of the late Abbasid translation movement, and the masters whose names attach to his training belong to it: Yuhanna ibn Haylan, with whom he is said to have read the Aristotelian Organon, and Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus, the Nestorian logician whose circle was making the Greek commentators speak Arabic. Late in life he passed to the court of the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawla, and it was from Aleppo that he came at last to Damascus, where he died around 950 at roughly eighty years of age. Around that sparse frame later writers hung anecdotes — that he mastered many languages, that he played and theorised music, that he lived with monastic simplicity, that he served for a time as a judge — which scholarship treats as portrait rather than fact. What survives securely is the work: commentaries and paraphrases of Aristotle’s logic, treatises on the harmony of Plato and Aristotle, and books on the ordering of the sciences, the intellect, and the ideal community.

The logical writings are the foundation on which the rest is built. Al-Farabi worked through the whole of the Organon — including the Rhetoric and Poetics, which the Alexandrian curriculum counted as logic’s last two books — in commentaries, paraphrases, and short epistles, and he placed that art at the head of the sciences. His Enumeration of the Sciences (Ihsa al-Ulum) maps the disciplines in order — language, logic, the mathematical sciences, physics, metaphysics, and the political-ethical sciences — and the map is itself an argument: that the sciences form a single graded ascent, each resting on the one beneath it, with no break between the study of nature and the study of the divine. This was not antiquarianism. He held that demonstrative knowledge had been lost to the world and had now to be recovered, and he wrote as a man restoring a damaged inheritance rather than merely glossing it.

His metaphysics is Neoplatonism rebuilt on an Aristotelian foundation. From the First, the necessary being beyond multiplicity, there proceeds a descending series of separate intellects, each turning the sphere assigned to it, down to the tenth — the Active Intellect, which governs the sublunar world and illuminates the human mind, enabling it to think. The First is one without remainder: in it essence and existence coincide, and it knows nothing but itself, since to know anything lower would compromise its simplicity. Yet from that single act of self-knowledge the many proceed. The First thinks itself, and a second intellect comes to be; the second contemplates the First and itself, and from that double thought issue a third intellect and the outermost sphere; and so the cascade runs through the spheres of the fixed stars and the planets — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon — until the tenth intellect stands at the lower edge of the heavens with nothing further to generate but the unstable world of coming-to-be and passing-away. That tenth is the Active Intellect, and it does two kinds of work at once. It is the giver of the forms that the matter of this world receives, and it is the light by which the human intellect passes from mere capacity to actual thought. Knowledge, on this account, is the soul’s ascent toward that intellect: the mind moves from a bare potential to think (the material intellect), through the actual grasp of intelligibles, to an acquired intellect that holds them as a settled possession, and at its summit it draws near to the Active Intellect itself. The philosopher who completes the climb attains a felicity that is the true end of human life. Al-Farabi held that the prophet reaches the same truths the philosopher reaches by demonstration, but receives them through a perfected imagination, in images the multitude can grasp — a reading that placed revelation and reason on one continuous ladder, and that later thinkers would find either illuminating or dangerous.

The prophetology repays a closer look, because it is the hinge between the cosmos and the city. The light of the Active Intellect ordinarily reaches a person through the rational faculty, in the slow labor of demonstration. But in a soul whose imaginative faculty has been brought to its utmost perfection, that same emanation can flow into the imagination directly, and the truths the philosopher would reach as abstract intelligibles arrive instead already clothed in vivid images, symbols, and parables. The one who receives them this way is the prophet — and because he holds the same content as the philosopher, but in a form the unphilosophical multitude can receive, he is uniquely fitted to found a religion and a law. Within the broader field of Islamic prophetology and doxography, al-Farabi’s position is the boldest naturalization of revelation: prophecy becomes a psychological perfection rather than a sheer interruption from outside, and scripture becomes philosophy translated into the imaginative idiom of a people. He did not say that revelation was false; he said it was true in the way an image is true of what it images. The unease this provoked is easy to see — it makes the philosopher, not the prophet, the holder of the unveiled original.

That continuity carried into his politics. In The Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City (Mabadi ara ahl al-madina al-fadila), and again in The Political Regime (al-Siyasa al-madaniyya), he transposed Plato’s Republic into an emanationist key: the well-ordered city mirrors the well-ordered cosmos, and is ruled best by a philosopher-prophet who unites theoretical wisdom with the craft of legislation. The analogy is exact and deliberate. As the First governs the cosmos and the Active Intellect orders the sublunar world, so the right ruler orders the city; and as the heart governs the limbs of a healthy body, so the ruler — at once philosopher, prophet, lawgiver, and imam — gives the parts of the city their ranks and ends. Around this single ideal the work catalogs the defective cities as carefully as the virtuous one. There is the ignorant city, whose people have never known the true ends of life and chase wealth, honor, pleasure, conquest, or mere survival — a type al-Farabi subdivides further, down to the democratic city in which every appetite is given free rein and no common good rules. There is the wicked city, whose people know the good but act against it; the errant city, fed false images of happiness by a ruler who deceives; and the city that has changed, falling away from a virtue it once held. The quiet implication of the whole scheme — that a community’s health depends on the soundness of the knowledge at its head — gave the falsafa tradition a political theory to match its cosmology, and it set the frame in which later philosophers in Islam, and Jewish thinkers reading them, would think about law, prophecy, and rule.

One treatise has become a problem in its own right: the Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages, the Divine Plato and Aristotle (Kitab al-jam bayn ray ay al-hakimayn), which argues that the apparent quarrels between the two — over the eternity of the world, the theory of Forms, the soul — dissolve on close reading, so that the two masters teach a single philosophy. The work leans, at its metaphysical climax, on the so-called Theology of Aristotle, in fact a paraphrase of Plotinus’s Enneads that circulated under Aristotle’s name; to read Aristotle as a Neoplatonist was, given that misattribution, almost forced. The harmonizing ambition the Harmonization expresses is genuinely Farabian, but its authorship is now contested: Marwan Rashed has argued on doctrinal grounds that the treatise cannot be by al-Farabi at all, since its positions run against his settled views and sit closer to those of Yahya ibn Adi. The dispute is not a footnote. How one reads the Harmonization shapes how one reads the whole man — whether the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonist in him are one thinker or two in uneasy company.

His influence ran in two directions. Avicenna built on his account of the intellects and his distinction between essence and existence — the emanation of intellects, the Active Intellect as giver of forms, and the contingency of all being save the Necessary Existent — and through Avicenna that architecture passed into the wider currents of Islamic Neoplatonism and, much later, into the metaphysics of being that Akbarian Sufism would inherit and transform. The Latin West met him through translation as Alpharabius: Gerard of Cremona rendered the Enumeration of the Sciences at Toledo, where Dominicus Gundissalinus reworked it and translated the Epistle on the Intellect, so that al-Farabi’s ordering of knowledge and his doctrine of the intellect entered the schools that would feed into Thomas Aquinas. In the Jewish world he was read as the philosopher’s philosopher; Maimonides, in his letter to his Hebrew translator, set al-Farabi’s logic above every other authority, and his shadow lies across medieval Jewish Neoplatonism and the political reading of prophecy that runs from the falsafa into the Jewish philosophers who learned from it. The harmonising ambition that defined him — Plato with Aristotle, Greek philosophy with Islamic revelation, the cosmos with the city — is also what made him a target, and al-Ghazali’s later attack on the philosophers was in part an attack on the system Al-Farabi had done most to assemble.

The texts and the scholarship

The figure described above belongs to a tradition of recovery: most of what can be said with confidence about al-Farabi rests on a century of critical editing and translation, and the contours of his thought have shifted as that work has advanced. The standard point of entry to his political theology is Richard Walzer’s edition and translation of the Virtuous City, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State (Oxford, 1985), which prints the Arabic with a facing English version and a commentary that ties the work to its Greek Neoplatonic background; Walzer’s attributions of particular doctrines to lost Greek sources have themselves been debated since. The political corpus is otherwise most accessible in the renderings of Muhsin Mahdi, whose Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (rev. ed., Cornell, 2001) gathers the Attainment of Happiness, the Philosophy of Plato, and the Philosophy of Aristotle, and in Charles E. Butterworth’s Alfarabi, The Political Writings (two volumes, Cornell, 2001 and 2015), which includes the disputed Harmonization. The case against that treatise’s authenticity is laid out by Marwan Rashed in On the Authorship of the Treatise on the Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages Attributed to al-Fārābī (Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2009), a study that has reshaped the way the relation of his Aristotelianism to his Neoplatonism is now posed.

For the philosophy of mind and the doctrine of intellect, Herbert Davidson’s Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect (Oxford, 1992) remains the detailed account of the four intellects and the conjunction with the Active Intellect, and of how al-Farabi’s scheme was rebuilt by his successors. Peter Adamson’s chapters on al-Farabi in Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford, 2016) give the most readable orientation to the whole. The fullest reference treatments are the open-access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, whose principal article al-Farabi is supplemented by dedicated entries on al-Farabi’s Psychology and Epistemology and on his metaphysics and his philosophy of society and religion, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s survey al-Farabi (Arabic Neoplatonism), which sets his cosmology of emanating intellects against the al-Kindi circle’s earlier Arabic Plotinus. Cristina D’Ancona and Peter Adamson have established the textual character of that pseudo-Theology of Aristotle on which the Harmonization depends, locating in the ninth-century Kindian milieu the Arabic Plotinus and the Arabic Proclus — the Liber de Causis — that gave al-Farabi and his heirs their Neoplatonic raw material. Read against that background, the Second Teacher appears less as a commentator than as the architect who first gave the falsafa tradition a single continuous structure, from the First Cause to the constitution of a city.

→ Related: Arabic Falsafa Islamic Philosophy · Neoplatonism · Emanation · Nous · The One · Aristotle · Plato · Avicenna · Al Kindi · Islamic Neoplatonism · Islamic Prophetology Doxography · Metaphysics · Proclus · Thomas Aquinas · Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud