Abu Nasr al-Farabi · Philosophy
al-Farabi’s cosmology and its human payoff: how all things flow (emanate) from the perfect, self-sufficient First Cause down through a hierarchy of intellects to our world; how the last of them, the Active Intellect, lights up the human mind; and how our happiness lies in perfecting that mind until it reaches conjunction with it.
al-Farabi’s universe begins from a single, perfect source he calls the First Cause or First Existent (in Islamic terms, God). This First is utterly one and utterly complete: it depends on nothing, is caused by nothing, has no matter and no parts, no opposite and no partner, and needs nothing outside itself. It does not create by deliberating or choosing in the way a craftsman does; rather, because it is supremely perfect and overflowing in existence, being flows from it - the way light streams from the sun simply because the sun is luminous, not because it decides to shine. This flowing-forth is called emanation. The First Cause loses nothing and gains nothing by it; its perfection is not diminished by overflowing, any more than a lamp is dimmed by lighting another. From this one perfect source, al-Farabi will derive the entire structured universe, rung by rung, in a great descending cascade of being.
But how does a multitude of things come from something that is perfectly one? This is the ancient puzzle al-Farabi must solve, and his answer is a graded cascade of intellects. From the First Cause there proceeds a single being, the First (or Second) Intellect. This intellect does two things: it contemplates the First Cause above it, and it contemplates its own nature - and from this double act of thought, two further things flow: another intellect below it, and the first heavenly sphere. That next intellect repeats the pattern, generating the intellect beneath it and another sphere - and so the process descends, step by step, through a series of ten intellects, each paired with one of the celestial spheres of the medieval cosmos (the outermost heaven, the fixed stars, and the spheres of the planets down to the Moon). Multiplicity thus unfolds gradually, by stages, each level a little further from the pure unity of the First. The universe is a great hierarchy of mind, descending from the One toward our world.
Here al-Farabi’s cosmology becomes an ethics - a doctrine of what human life is for. If the Active Intellect lights up the mind, then the highest human task is to develop that mind as far as it can go: to move from the bare potential intellect we are born with, through the actual intellect that has grasped many truths, to the acquired intellect that has made the intelligible order its own - and finally to conjunction (ittisal) with the Active Intellect itself, the state in which the perfected human mind attains a kind of union with the very source of its light. This conjunction is, for al-Farabi, the supreme happiness (sa’ada) for which we exist, and the closest a human being comes to the divine. It is also the ground of the soul’s survival: the mind that has been perfected and joined to the Active Intellect can outlast the body that once housed it. Happiness, then, is not pleasure, wealth, or honour; it is intellectual perfection - the mind fully awakened, fully in act, ascending toward its source.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that al-Farabi’s cosmos emanates from the First Cause through a chain of intellects down to the Active Intellect, which actualizes the human mind; and that human happiness and immortality consist in perfecting the intellect until it reaches conjunction with the Active Intellect. Explain the emanation schem…
Leads to Plotinus.
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