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

4 6 Interpretation
power to order the citizens’ lives, philosopher-kings could remain philosopherkings
only in their own lives (52). Lacking political power per se would not
necessarily mean that philosophers were not helping to order the lives of the
city. Miriam Galston’s “Theoretical and Practical Dimensions of Happiness”
poses the possibility of an informal kind of influence for philosophers in the
political realm, as educators, for instance (Galston 1992, 148–49). And isn’t that
what Alfarabi himself is doing?
Still, Alfarabi may intend more. Recall his ambiguous advice
in the Virtuous City, mentioned earlier: that it is an error to wholly refuse to
judge relative truths and that it is also an error to believe definitive truth is
humanly accessible. Applying that advice to the king-imam-philosopher in a
real life society suggests that the role will vary within each society and over
time. It is not merely religions that will differ across societies, according to
Alfarabi’s logic, but also the extent to which the king-imam-philosopher is
incorporated. Arriving at the appropriate influence of each is an objective worthy
of our continuing effort. Even with the ultimate effort, no society will be
perfectly happy or have a corner on the happiness market, but some societies
will be happier than others, depending on how their citizens handle the
“human things.”
Medieval Muslim society did not take Alfarabi’s advice.
Parens sees a connection between that and what he describes as “Islam’s inability
to adapt to the modern world,” so he has brought Alfarabi back for a repeat
performance (4). Although “inability to adapt” is an overgeneralized characterization
of the Muslim world, what Parens has successfully demonstrated in this
work is that Islam’s own philosophic tradition—in the works of Alfarabi—
contains a means of internally consistent adaptation to tolerance and even
encouragement of religious diversity in the modern world.
R EFERENCES
Alfarabi. 1985. Principles of the Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City.
Translated and edited by Richard Walzer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2002. Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Translated with an introduction
by Muhsin Mahdi. Foreword by Charles E. Butterworth and Thomas
L. Pangle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.