Abu Nasr al-Farabi · Philosophy
al-Farabi’s political masterpiece: the <em>excellent city</em> (<em>al-Madina al-Fadila</em>), modelled on the healthy body and the ordered cosmos, ruled by a philosopher who has reached the truth - and the ignorant, wicked, and errant cities that are his diagnoses of every way a community can fail.
al-Farabi begins his political philosophy from a simple fact: no human being can reach perfection alone. We are needy creatures who require one another for the very necessities of life, and far more for the higher goods - knowledge, virtue, and the happiness that crowns them. So human beings come together in communities, and the smallest community complete enough to make a full human life possible is the city. But cities are not all alike. The excellent or virtuous city (al-madina al-fadila) is the one whose people cooperate in order to attain true happiness - the real perfection of the human being - rather than mere wealth, pleasure, or power. Its whole purpose is to arrange human life so that its members can actually reach the end for which they exist. A city, for al-Farabi, is not just a mechanism for survival or security; it is an instrument of human flourishing, and it is judged by the kind of happiness it aims at.
The body analogy is more than a metaphor; it is one rung of a grand vision in which the same pattern of ordered hierarchy repeats at every level of reality. At the summit stands the cosmos itself: the First Cause, from which everything flows, governs a descending order of intellects and heavenly spheres. The healthy human body mirrors this - the ruling heart, then organs of ever-lower rank, all cooperating. And the excellent city mirrors it again - the ruler, then classes of citizens in descending ranks, each serving the whole. For al-Farabi these are not three separate facts but one truth showing itself three times: reality is an ordered hierarchy in which higher principles govern lower ones for the good of the whole. The just city is therefore not an artificial human invention imposed on indifferent matter; it is a human community brought into line with the very structure of being. To build the virtuous city is to make society echo the order of the cosmos.
al-Farabi is exacting about who may hold this supreme office, and he draws his list partly from Plato. The first ruler must be a person of rare natural endowment and long cultivation - by nature quick to understand and retentive of memory, passionately in love with learning and with truth, temperate in appetite and disdainful of wealth and mere pleasure, magnanimous, just, and courageous in doing what he sees to be right. He must also have reached the peak of theoretical wisdom and be a gifted communicator, able to move a whole people by images and speech. Such a combination is almost impossibly rare - which al-Farabi frankly admits. When no single person unites all these gifts, rule may pass to a group who together possess them, or to a ‘second ruler’ who preserves and applies the laws the founder laid down. The demand is severe on purpose: al-Farabi wants us to feel how much a truly good political order asks, and how far most actual rulers fall short of it.
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 excellent city is built on cooperation for a shared end - true happiness - and is ordered like a healthy body under its ruling organ; that its first ruler must be a philosopher (and prophet); and that its failures fall into ignorant, wicked, and errant cities. Explain these ideas in your o…
Leads to Plato.
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