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

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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.
Book Review: An Islamic Philosophy of Virtuous Religions 4 7 Colmo, Christopher A.. 2005. Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder. New York: Lexington Books. Galston, Miriam. 1992. The Theoretical and Practical Dimensions of Happiness. In Charles E. Butterworth, ed., The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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