The Attainment of Happiness

Overview

About fifty pages, written around 940 by Abu Nasr Al-Farabi, who worked mostly in Baghdad and Aleppo and died around 950. He is the first great systematic philosopher of the Islamic world writing after the major Greek texts had been translated into Arabic, and he earned from later thinkers the title of the Second Teacher, ranking him just below Aristotle, whom Arabic tradition simply called the First Teacher.

The treatise is the first part of a trilogy. It is followed by The Philosophy of Plato, a summary of Plato’s teaching organized around the way his dialogues lead a reader step by step toward wisdom, and The Philosophy of Aristotle, a similar summary of Aristotle’s system. Read together, the three works present Al-Farabi’s central and characteristically bold thesis: that Plato and Aristotle, despite surface disagreements, taught a single unified philosophy, and that this philosophy is the same truth that revealed religion conveys through different means.

The historical setting matters. Al-Farabi worked at a moment when the corpus of Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s logical and metaphysical works, had recently become available in Arabic translation, largely through Christian and Muslim translators working in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom and related institutions. He was among the first to absorb this material fully and use it to construct an original political philosophy suited to an Islamic context, and nearly every later Islamic philosopher, including Avicenna and Averroes, and Jewish philosophers writing in Arabic, including Maimonides, worked in his wake.

The argument

The four things happiness requires. Al-Farabi opens by stating that human happiness, in individuals and in cities and nations, depends on four things being present together: the theoretical virtues, the deliberative virtues, the moral virtues and the practical arts.

Theoretical virtues are the sciences properly understood: not mere true opinion, but demonstrative knowledge of causes, arrived at through logic, built up through the mathematical sciences to physics and finally to metaphysics, which studies being as such and culminates in knowledge of the First Cause. This is the highest of the four because it alone grasps things as they truly are rather than merely as they appear or are commonly believed.

Deliberative virtues are practical wisdom: the capacity to reason correctly about what should be done in particular circumstances, where universal theoretical knowledge must be applied to changing situations that no fixed rule can fully anticipate.

Moral virtues are the settled character traits, courage, temperance, justice and the rest, that dispose a person to act well without struggle, developed through habituation rather than through argument alone.

Practical arts are the trained skills, medicine, farming, the crafts, through which the deliberative and moral virtues are put into external effect and a community’s material needs are met.

Al-Farabi insists these four must be present together and reinforce one another. Theoretical knowledge without moral virtue produces someone who understands the good but has no character to act on it; moral virtue without theoretical knowledge produces someone well-intentioned but liable to error about what the good actually requires in a given case.

Why the city is where happiness happens. A crucial move: Al-Farabi holds, following Aristotle, that a human being cannot achieve final happiness alone. The virtues, especially the moral and deliberative ones, are inherently social; courage and justice only mean anything in relation to other people, and the theoretical virtues themselves are transmitted through teaching, which requires a community organized to make that transmission possible. So the question of individual happiness becomes inseparable from the question of what kind of city or nation can support it.

This is where the treatise turns explicitly political. A city is happy, on this account, when its arrangements actually produce the four virtues in its citizens, which means the city needs a particular kind of ruler.

The philosopher-king-prophet-legislator. The ruler required is someone who has fully attained the theoretical virtues through genuine philosophical demonstration, who also possesses excellent deliberative capacity to apply that knowledge to changing political circumstances, who has the moral virtues in the highest degree, and who additionally has the practical and rhetorical skill to communicate philosophical truth to people who cannot follow philosophical argument.

That last requirement is the treatise’s most distinctive contribution. Al-Farabi does not think most people are capable of grasping demonstrative philosophical truth directly; that capacity belongs to a small number of naturally gifted and rigorously trained individuals. But everyone needs some version of the truth to live well and to hold the community together, and this is supplied through images, similitudes and symbols, which is to say through religion, myth, poetry and law, all of which convey philosophical content in a form the non-philosophical majority can grasp and be moved by.

The person who can produce these images accurately, so that they genuinely correspond to the philosophical truth rather than distorting it, and who can legislate laws that embody it in practice, is functioning as a prophet and lawgiver. And Al-Farabi’s central claim is that this capacity and the philosopher’s capacity for demonstration are, in the ideally excellent individual, one and the same power operating in two directions: outward toward the multitude as prophecy and legislation, inward toward first causes as philosophical demonstration.

Hence the treatise’s famous formula, repeated with variations: the philosopher, the supreme ruler, the prince, the legislator and the imam name a single reality. Whoever combines philosophical wisdom with the capacity to found and maintain a virtuous city, whether we call that person by the Greek title or the Islamic one, is doing the same work.

The virtuous city and its opposites. Al-Farabi briefly sketches what a city organized around this ruler and these four virtues would look like, in outline here and at much greater length in his separate work on the Virtuous City. He also names the deficient alternatives: cities ruled by ignorance of true happiness, which mistake wealth, honor or pleasure for the final end, and cities that once possessed the truth but have corrupted or lost it. The virtuous city is presented as rare and fragile, always vulnerable to being overtaken by these more common, lesser forms.

How to read it

Read it as the compressed statement of a system developed at much greater length elsewhere in Al-Farabi’s corpus, particularly the Virtuous City and the Political Regime. This treatise gives the skeleton; those works put flesh on it.

Pay close attention to the account of theoretical virtue and its relation to the other three. Al-Farabi’s insistence that demonstrative knowledge of causes is the necessary foundation, without which the other virtues remain unstable or misdirected, is the philosophical backbone that everything political in the treatise depends on.

Take the identification of philosopher and prophet seriously as an argument, not just an assertion. Al-Farabi is not saying philosophy and religion happen to agree; he is offering an account of why they must convey the same content, given what he takes the human intellect and the human imagination to each be capable of.

Notice what this does to the status of ordinary religious believers and ordinary citizens. They are not failed philosophers in this picture; they are people receiving the same truth through the appropriate channel for their capacities, which is a genuinely respectful account of religious life from someone who is, at bottom, doing philosophy.

Read Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed after this if the ideas interest you. Maimonides, writing in Arabic and deeply read in Al-Farabi, takes up the same problem, how philosophical truth and revealed religion relate, for a Jewish audience, and the family resemblance between the two projects is unmistakable.

And keep Plato’s Republic in view throughout. Al-Farabi’s philosopher-ruler is explicitly built on Plato’s philosopher-king, transposed into a framework that adds prophecy and revealed law as necessary components that Plato’s Athens did not need to account for.

Questions it raises

• If most people cannot follow philosophical demonstration, is conveying truth to them through images a form of respect or a form of condescension?
• Can religion and philosophy really convey identical content through different means, or does the form of communication change what is actually communicated?
• Al-Farabi requires his ideal ruler to combine capacities that rarely occur together, wisdom, virtue, rhetorical skill and political power. What happens to his account of happiness when no such person exists?
• Is the fusion of philosopher, king, legislator and prophet into one role a solution to the problem of political authority, or a recipe for a claim to authority that cannot be checked?
• Does the theory work if applied to a leader who claims philosophical insight but lacks Al-Farabi’s rigorous training in demonstration?
• What does this account owe to Plato’s Republic, and what does it change to fit a world with prophetic religion already given?