Why Al-Farabi Matters

Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE), Muslim thinker, scientist, musician, occupies an important place in world intellectual history--and, yes, it is time that we shed nationalistic, cultural, or regional chauvinisms and begin to speak in terms of the world's (or the human race's) intellectual heritage. Previous generations of European and American scholars looked upon al-Farabi as the "father of Islamic Neo-Platonism" and, in that fashion, found a secure (and out of the way) place for him. Then, in 1995, Joshua Parens turned to al-Farabi's Summary of Plato's "Laws" in what appears to me to be an attempt to rescue Plato (nota bene: it was not al-Farabi who needed rescuing, but Plato) from the critical disembowling he received at the hands of Heideggerians and others in the post-modernist crowd. [The book is Joshua Parens, Metaphysics As Rhetoric, Albany: SUNY Press, 1995].

Parens felt the lure of the "rhetorical turn" among humanists that was in full-swing by the early 1990's and--not at all unreasonably, in my view--was unwilling to sit back and watch Plato being unceremoniously consigned to the ash heap of intellectual history. In addition, as a student of Ralph Lerner's at the University of Chicago, he had the advantage over many (if not most) professional classicists and philosophers working in the American academy today in that he was educated in the ways that medieval Muslim thinkers had developed the interpretive tradition of the Platonic corpus. That's right--developed the interpretive tradition: Muslim intellectuals have been significant players in the (still) continuing (human) habit of reflecting upon the lucubrations of the classical Greeks.

What Parens found in al-Farabi's reading of Plato's Laws was a studied refusal to regard Plato as the purveyor of a speculative philosophy which posited a metaphysical reality beneath or beyond the world of sensual appearances. European interpreters (pagan and Christian alike) had always read Plato in that fashion; but al-Farabi (in Parens's hands) finds not a metaphysician in Plato (or, at least, in the Plato of the Laws) but a rhetorician.

If Parens belonged to the tribe of Orientalists and had chosen to write about al-Farabi in this way, his readers could rest assured that he did so with the honorable intention (honorable among previous generations of Orientalists and among some of the present generation of neo-Orientalists) of either demonstrating that al-Farabi, an Iranian Muslim, simply failed to understand Plato (for what Iranian or Muslim possessed the mental capacity to understand the divine Plato?) or, at best, to damn him with faint praise. But Parens had a different agenda in mind. He astutely recognized that if he was to have any hope of rehabilitating Plato from the post-modernist critique of "foundationalism," he needed al-Farabi. And so he does not rest content with showing the reader the manner in which al-Farabi arrived at Plato the rhetorician--he goes further. Parens argues that al-Farabi was the first interpreter of Plato to truly understand him.

It is an interesting argument and, in some respects, I find it compelling--not necessarily as to Parens's desire to "uncover" the "real" Plato (which is, in itself, an ironically "foundationalist" project). I find it compelling because, with Kenneth Burke, I read all metaphysical speculation as a mode of rhetorical discourse. The metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, of al-Farabi himself, of Hegel and of Marx are all, in my book, species of rhetoric. And so, if al-Farabi understood Plato in that way--whether Plato understood himself in that way or not--then al-Farabi anticipated Kenneth Burke by a thousand years.

And that is why al-Farabi matters.