Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

Book Review: An Islamic Philosophy of Virtuous Religions
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seem to be included as a demonstration that Plato and Aristotle agree with
each other and that both concur with Alfarabi. Parens believes this is a ruse.
What Alfarabi is actually offering is a demonstration that all three of the
philosophers fail to apprehend theoretical knowledge; each of the three intentionally
shows the limits of human knowledge and the resulting absence of
grounds for philosophers’ ruling society. I like the way Charles Butterworth
and Thomas Pangle describe this as a “charade of speaking as if it were the serious
purpose of political philosophy to rule directly over a (new) political
order…He has intended to arouse the shocked wonder and hence thought of a
few readers while allowing most to believe, in self-congratulatory fashion, in
political philosophy as a wildly impractical castle-building-in-Spain” (Alfarabi
2002, xi). This conclusion is the basis of Parens’ first and second “waves,” and
here Parens agrees with Christopher Colmo’s conclusions in Breaking With
Athens (Colmo 2005)—absolute truth is inaccessible, the virtuous city is pie in
the sky, and the important quality in real life governance is prudence or practical
wisdom. There is a difference, though. While Colmo convincingly draws
our attention to the force of practical wisdom, Parens reminds us that Alfarabi
also values the quest for wisdom. “Alfarabi’s persistent shattering of our hopes
for certainty is not intended to destroy our love of wisdom” (118).“We must be
careful to avoid falling into an unlimited form of skepticism. At a minimum,
political philosophy is up to the task of recognizing the limits of human knowledge.
It is fully capable of warning us of the dangers of presupposing greater
knowledge than we possess” (115). This aspect of Parens’ argument is perhaps
best supported by Parens’ own description of his interpretation of Alfarabi’s
intention as “a cross between a standard and a cautionary tale” (11).
One of the intriguing aspects of Alfarabi’s writings is his penchant
for ranking. Souls, causes, beings, religions, and cities are sorted from
first to last, highest to lowest, most true to least true, most virtuous to most
base. But if, as Parens’ Alfarabi contends, there is no certainty of the “First
Cause” or of the most virtuous regime, then causes or regimes cannot be
ranked in descending order from them. So why bother? It is possible that rankings
are there to demonstrate the arrogance behind such an exercise. But it is
also possible that Alfarabi is saying what he claims to be saying (granted, this
would be unusual for Alfarabi), i.e., that there are some qualitative differences
among personal lives and regimes (existing and theoretical). Only a relativist
would not see at least some degree of qualitative difference between Hitler’s
regime and Winston Churchill’s, for example, and Parens has argued that
Alfarabi is a promoter of wisdom in spite of its limitations and not a relativist.