3

From Alfarabi’s Plato to Strauss’s Alfarabi

“Fârâbî’s Plato” is an enigmatic essay.¹ It is one of only three texts that Strauss dedicated exclusively to an Islamic philosopher, in all three cases to Alfarabi. The other two essays, namely “A Lost Writing of Farâbî’s” and “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws” had destinies which distinguish them from “Fârâbî’s Plato.”² “A Lost Writing of Farâbî’s,” written sometime in 1935 and published in 1936, is a rather limited essay whose sole objective is to show that some parts of Falaquera’s Reshit Ḥokhmah are a summary of a trilogy of Alfarabi which includes Attainment of Happiness, Philosophy of Plato, and Philosophy of Aristotle. Strauss’s claim in this text was rather modest and was bound to be become obsolete by the publication of the second part of the trilogy in 1943.³ It therefore makes sense that Strauss never tried to republish this early essay in his later collections. “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws,” this last writing of Strauss on Alfarabi, published first in Louis Massignon’s Festschrift in 1957, like practically all of Strauss’s monographs was later included in a collection of essays in 1959. “Fârâbî’s Plato” was neither a limited essay like “A Lost Writing of Farâbî’s,” nor was it republished in later collections by Strauss.⁴

“Fârâbî’s Plato” is also enigmatic because it is a meticulous study dedicated exclusively to a very minor writing of Alfarabi, whose full title is “The philosophy of Plato, its parts, and the grades of dignity of its parts, from its beginning to its end” (hereafter Plato). Although Muhsin Mahdi, one of the foremost scholars of Alfarabi and Strauss’s student, called the trilogy which includes this work “Alfarabi’s most important philosophical work,” one must confess that the importance of at least the last two parts seem to have escaped everyone else.⁵ In fact, Mahdi himself ignored a detailed discussion of Plato in his major writing on Alfarabi. Although this writing of Alfarabi is not entirely ignored by other scholars, Strauss’s essay remains the only detailed monograph on this work in the more than seven decades since the critical edition of this work became available to scholars.⁶ A cursory look at Plato shows the reason for this lack of interest: it is a very minor treatise of less than twenty-one pages in Arabic, with obscure and perplexing content. Alfarabi’s objective in this short treatise is to expound the philosophy of Plato from its beginning to its end. This rather ambitious plan is very modestly executed, because what Alfarabi mainly does is simply name the Platonic dialogues, explain their titles in rather fanciful terms, and give a very short but bewildering summary of their content, which in many cases hardly corresponds to what we find in those works. One can say that this writing of Alfarabi, even more than his references to the apocryphal Theology of Aristotle, confirms the low opinion of the most prominent scholars about the access of Islamic philosophers to Greek philosophical writings: how can anyone who had access to the dialogues of Plato believe that Protagoras means “compassion” or that Laches means “preparation” or that Crito is also called the Apology of Socrates?⁷ In full knowledge of these major problems to which he also refers, Strauss decided to write a detailed study on this minor writing of Alfarabi. One reason for this special attention seems to be that this work is exclusively dedicated to the presentation of Platonic philosophy, which was one of Strauss’s constant preoccupations during his life. Strauss’s other study of Alfarabi is also dedicated to another writing of Alfarabi on Plato’s Laws. In other words, Plato and Alfarabi’s summary of Plato’s Laws are of particular interest to Strauss because both are “historical” works on Platonic dialogues. But considering the dubious historical worth of these two writings, one cannot say that we have a convincing explanation for Strauss’s emphatic interest. This explanation is only possible after a detailed discussion of the project which Strauss pursues in “Fârâbî’s Plato,” the discussion which is the subject of this chapter.

Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, and Islam

“Fârâbî’s Plato” can be described as an esoteric reading of Alfarabi’s short treatise. In other words, Strauss’s essay tries to unveil the esoteric teaching of Alfarabi’s treatise, which is different from what one acquires while reading it in a nonesoteric way. Consequently, the use and discussion of different esoteric techniques is one of the major parts of Strauss’s text. The problem of esotericism appears rather early in “Fârâbî’s Plato,” and already at the beginning of his paper, Strauss begins to apply his esoteric method to some of the major preconceptions about Islamic philosophy: he begins his text by reminding us of the importance of the Falāsifa for understanding Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed.⁸ This is because – although appearances might prove misleading – Maimonides’s Guide“presents itself as a Jewish correction of the latter.” The Falāsifa or “the philosophers” are defined by Strauss, following the scholarly convention, as “Islamic Aristotelians,” and their teaching is described “as a blend of genuine Aristotelianism with Neo-platonism” and, Strauss adds, “of course, Islamic tenets” ( 1). This common description of Islamic philosophers – which is very much alive to this day – as well as Strauss’s use of the term “Maimonides’ philosophic background” ( 2) suggest that a critical engagement and evaluation of the common scholarly views is one of Strauss’s first major concerns in this essay. Beginning with a discussion of the apparent Aristotelianism of Islamic philosophers, Strauss emphasizes one aspect of The political governments and its two parallels: in these writings Alfarabi treats “the whole of philosophy … within a political framework” thus imitating Plato’s Republic and Laws, rather than any writing of Aristotle ( 4). We might therefore suspect that to call Alfarabi an Aristotelian is not very precise. Among other things, a clear-cut separation of theoretical from practical philosophy seems absent in at least some of Alfarabi’s works. But if to describe Alfarabi as a strict Aristotelian is not entirely correct, should one not also rethink Alfarabi’s Neo-Platonism, as well as his adherence to “Islamic tenets”? Concerning Neo-Platonism, Strauss explains that to reconcile his Aristotelianism with this radical Platonism, Alfarabi could try to show that “the explicit teachings” of Plato and Aristotle can be reconciled.⁹ This way is followed in a treatise of Alfarabi entitled Concordance of the opinions of Plato and Aristotle ( 5). Strauss cautions us, however, not to attach great importance to this work as a reliable source representing Alfarabi’s thought. Strauss arrives at this conclusion through two points, referred to in footnote 4: First is the use of the term “opinion” in the title of the Concordance, which Strauss apparently understands to be the equivalent of the Greek doxa. In other words, the positions defended in the Concordance should be considered to be the “opinions” of unphilosophical character, rather than Alfarabi’s own philosophical positions.¹⁰ Second, in the Concordance, Alfarabi makes use of the Theology of Aristotle to defend the philosophers against the attacks of the orthodox theologians; in this work Alfarabi manages to harmonize Plato and Aristotle mainly by relying on the pseudo-Aristotelian Theology of Aristotle. Alfarabi, Strauss claims, seems to be aware of the fact that this Neo-Platonic work is falsely attributed to Aristotle. On the basis of these points, Strauss – here following Paul Kraus, who is referred to in the footnote – believes that Concordance is “an exoteric treatise” which cannot be relied on for discovering Alfarabi’s true, esoteric teaching.¹¹ Supplementary arguments against the Neo-Platonic reading of Alfarabi are offered in 8, where Strauss claims that our first impression of reading Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato, the impression which Strauss thinks will only be reinforced by further investigation, is that Alfarabi’s view of Plato’s philosophy cannot be considered Neo-Platonist: this impression is the result of the fact that Alfarabi seems to have identified philosophy with the practical art of the king, has apparently subordinated the philosophical themes of the Timaeus to the political subject matter of the Republic, and gives a particularly nonmetaphysical interpretation of Plato’s writings. It therefore seems that for Alfarabi, Plato’s philosophy is fundamentally political, and since Alfarabi “considered the Platonic view of philosophy the true view,” Alfarabi’s own philosophy is essentially political. Such a fundamentally political view of Platonic philosophy seems to be rather far from what is conventionally considered Neo-Platonic.

While Strauss began his discussion by describing the thought of Alfarabi and his followers as “a blend of genuine Aristotelianism with Neo-platonism and … Islamic tenets,” from this mixture “Neo-platonism” must be removed, as Aristotelianism was previously put aside. Strauss is aware of the unusual character of his view and confesses that this view of Alfarabi’s philosophy goes so much against our “inherited” opinions that he is, or rather we are, “hesitant” to accept it ( 8). The relation of philosophy and politics in the thought of Alfarabi seems therefore in need of further investigation, the investigation we will pursue when we speak about the precise nature of philosophy in Strauss’s essay. But independent of that question, we see that Strauss has thrown two of the widely held beliefs about Alfarabi into question: namely, his apparent Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism. We should wait and see whether the third belief mentioned by Strauss, namely, Alfarabi’s adherence to Islamic tenets, is also questioned. The third element is of particular importance because, more than any other aspect of Strauss’s interpretation, it is related to the question of esotericism.

Alfarabi’s Esotericism

Strauss’s essay seems to be as much about Alfarabi as about esotericism. This is why Strauss claims that he has “made free use” of it for the introduction of Persecution and the Art of Writing.¹² Strauss calls Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, and Islamic tenets the three “heterogeneous” elements which in Alfarabi’s thought are transformed into “a consistent, or intelligible, whole” through some “principle” which one might be able to grasp if one follows “the signpost” erected by Maimonides ( 1). This “principle” seems to be esotericism. The signpost is found in Maimonides’s letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon, in which he praises Alfarabi’s writings in the strongest terms, especially that book which he considered Alfarabi’s most important book. That book is called by Maimonides The principles of the beings, but Strauss tells us that its original title is The political governments.¹³ We therefore have a precise idea of the place one should begin the study of Maimonides’s Guide: Alfarabi’s Political governments. Although one here expects to read a discussion of this work, right away Strauss warns us that it “would be unwise to attempt such an analysis now,” because we still lack a satisfactory edition of The political governments and of its “two parallel works,” namely The principles of the opinions of the people of the virtuous city and The virtuous religious community.¹⁴ This very unsatisfactory explanation for refraining to provide a discussion of The political governments, the explanation which later on will be replaced by an esoteric explanation, does not stop Strauss from making some radical claims about this work.

Maimonides presumably preferred The political governments to its two other parallel presentations. Although Strauss does not pursue a study of The political governments, he reminds us of the fact that the proper understanding of this work “presupposes” the study of those parallel writings of Alfarabi. The reason is that the teaching contained in The political governments consists of “the silent rejection of certain tenets which are adhered to in the two other works” ( 3). For now, Strauss does not explain what he means by this statement, but one cannot ignore the fact that a tortuous line of argument, which only Strauss’s rhetoric can smooth out, has led us from Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed to a writing of Alfarabi which is not available for discussion, and from there to Alfarabi’s parallel works and their contradictions. From the title of Alfarabi’s treatise and also the description of Plato which Alfarabi provides at the end of The Attainment of Happiness, Strauss concludes that this work intends to be “a complete survey” of the philosophy of Plato. From this, Strauss concludes that if Alfarabi happens to overlook some Platonic topic in his presentation, one should conclude that Alfarabi considered that topic “either unimportant or merely exoteric” ( 6). We have therefore two esoteric techniques, which are supposed to help us access the true teaching of Alfarabi in his writings: as we shall see, silent rejection, which Strauss mentioned, is done through contradictions; this should be added to the practice of silence as another esoteric method. Let us begin with contradictions.

Strauss describes the use of contradictions as “a normal pedagogic device of the genuine philosophers.” He tells us that he learned this esoteric technique “from Maimonides who knew his Fârâbî” ( 13). This technique is used to explain the contradictions between The political governments and its parallel works: in The political governments and The virtuous religious community, two works in which Alfarabi expounds his own doctrine, Strauss claims, Alfarabi “pronounces more or less orthodox views concerning the life after death.” This is while, in his lost commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, discussing Aristotle’s views, Alfarabi goes so far as to say there is no happiness but in this life, and describes the religious doctrine of life after death as “ravings and old women’s tales” ( 17). The footnote attached to this section helps us understand better what is meant here: Strauss is following Ibn Tufayl, who claimed that Alfarabi’s works are full of uncertainties because in The virtuous religious community, Alfarabi has claimed the souls of the wicked live on forever in infinite torments after death, a doctrine which, like Strauss, one can call “simply orthodox.” What Strauss calls the “heretical” but also “tolerable” view is found in The political governments, where Alfarabi states that the souls of the wicked dissolve into nothing, and only those of the virtuous are immortal.¹⁵ We therefore have here a concrete example of the discrepancies between Alfarabi’s different writings, the contradictions between orthodox and heretical views that Strauss claimed is a typical concern of esoteric writers.

The second esoteric method is to simply refrain from mentioning an idea in a text as a way of showing one’s disagreement. Strauss does not try to find a historical source for this esoteric technique, but mentions several specific ideas in Alfarabi’s treatise which are discovered through awareness of this technique: According to Strauss, one expects that in his treatise, which intends to be “a complete survey” of the philosophy of Plato, Alfarabi mentions the doctrine of the immortality of the soul as it is presented in the Phaedrus, the Phaedo, and the Republic. Furthermore, as Alfarabi presents philosophy as fundamentally political, one would expect him to refer to the “ideas” of justice and of other virtues. But surprisingly, Alfarabi does not refer to any idea or the doctrine of ideas in his presentation. Similarly, the distinction between this world and the next, which Alfarabi mentions in his other writings, is completely absent in Plato. Strauss claims that Alfarabi’s disregard of the distinction between this world and the next, and his silence about Plato’s doctrine of immortality and ideas, show that Alfarabi “rejected” or rather considered these doctrines merely an “exoteric” part of Plato’s philosophy ( 16).

Repetition is another esoteric technique which Strauss finds originally in Maimonides and applies to Alfarabi’s treatise. According to Strauss’s reading of Maimonides, repetition is a normal pedagogic device of the philosophers ( 23). Esoteric repetition occurs when an esoteric writer repeats an idea, enumeration, or statement in his work while making slight changes. Those who are familiar with this esoteric technique detect these slight differences, which seem negligible to the untrained reader (“the vulgar”). For instance, in the discussion of Alfarabi’s view of the divine, Strauss mentions that Alfarabi uses the adjective “divine” as part of a dichotomy, the opposing element of which is “human” or “bestial.” In a subsequent passage, a repetition of this dichotomy, “human” and “bestial” are the opposing poles, that is, divine-bestial is replaced by human-bestial. According to Strauss’s reading, this is Alfarabi’s esoteric way of intimating his usage of the term “divine”: “divine” seems to be only a comparative category used for qualifying the superior alternative without any supernatural connotation ( 33).

Another esoteric method established through Maimonides is the importance of what appears only once in Alfarabi’s writings. This esoteric technique is of particular importance for understanding Plato as a whole, because this treatise itself is a rather unique writing of Alfarabi, and one on which Strauss exclusively relies for discerning Alfarabi’s true teaching. Now, considering the fact that some of the ideas expounded in Plato appear only in Plato and nowhere else, Strauss reminds us that following Maimonides’s guideline, one should not attach more weight to those ideas that are repeated most often; in fact, what is only said once has much more importance and says more about the true ideas of an esoteric writer than his oft-repeated claims ( 20).

As we have observed, Strauss relies on Maimonides for most of his esoteric techniques. There is, however, one specific esoteric technique, which he owes to Cicero, and that is the importance of centers (footnote 35). Strauss claims that one of the esoteric ways of conveying an important message to the careful and select reader is to put them at the center of an enumeration (for instance: the second item of a list which includes three items) or a text (for instance in the eleventh page of a twenty-one page text or the second part of a three-part treatise). In the case of Plato, the importance of the whole treatise is implied by the fact that it is the second part of a tripartite work. Because Plato is the central part of the trilogy, Strauss considers it “the least exposed part” of the work, in which Alfarabi can be more outspoken ( 16). For instance, because it is the central part, in this work Alfarabi can completely drop the distinction between the happiness of this world and that of the other world, while this distinction is prominent in the first part of his trilogy. In another instance, Strauss discusses three statements which Alfarabi makes concerning the relation between philosophy and the royal art, and concludes that the second or the central statement reflects Alfarabi’s true teaching. This esoteric technique is used by Alfarabi because, Strauss remarks, “the average reader,” or the many who are not familiar with this esoteric method, will not consider Alfarabi’s second or central statement his true teaching and similarly, will attribute as much weight to the first part of the trilogy as to its other parts ( 13).

One last esoteric method which, more than any other, seems important for Strauss’s study of Plato is commentary itself as an esoteric technique. In Strauss’s view, Plato is much more reliable as a source of Alfarabi’s true teachings, because in this treatise Alfarabi “sets forth explicitly, not so much his own views, as the views of someone else” ( 17). Alfarabi is less forthcoming when he speaks in his own name, for instance in his more canonical writings, because in those writings he is explicitly taking responsibility for the content of the work. Contrary to all other scholars, who put much more weight on the works in which Alfarabi sets forth his own doctrine, Strauss relies on Plato, in which Alfarabi presents the doctrines of someone else. Strauss believes that this way of writing is one of the most effective techniques of esoteric writing, because in this type of writing, Alfarabi “avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator, or of the historian, in order to speak his mind” ( 20). From this, Strauss concludes that we must scrupulously avoid having recourse to other writings of Alfarabi to interpret Plato, and in fact for him this short treatise takes precedence over all other writings of Alfarabi. When the doctrines deduced from it are in conflict with other writings of Alfarabi, one must therefore reject those other writings.

Alfarabi and Islam

In an age where religion has acquired the status of personal beliefs and of lifestyle, to question the religious beliefs of a past philosopher, let alone a Muslim philosopher, seems a rather outmoded subject of study.¹⁶ Strauss, on the contrary, since his early studies, shows a rather curious interest in this question, and the conflict of Reason and Revelation remained one of the major themes of his studies throughout his life. Considering the unusual character of this form of scholarship in the eyes of modern scholars, it is not surprising that some have criticized Strauss’s view of Islamic philosophy precisely because he sees it through the lens of the conflict between Reason and Revelation: they have even gone so far as to question whether such an inquiry, to which someone like al-Ghazali dedicated a substantial treatise and to which Averroes responded, was really a major issue at the time.¹⁷ Strauss’s engagement with Alfarabi’s esotericism is above all the reflection of his concern with the question of Reason and Revelation. If Alfarabi practices esoteric writing, it is above all because of his unorthodox religious ideas. Strauss claims that one must be aware of the peculiar situation of medieval thinkers in general and Alfarabi in particular: the Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were often free to state their doctrines because they were in most cases “under no compulsion to reconcile” them with “the requirements of faith” ( 15). Alfarabi and his companions were in a different position and had to take precautions in stating doctrines in contradiction to Muslim beliefs.

Strauss mentions five different views of Alfarabi which he believes are stated esoterically because they are incompatible with Islam. The heterodox doctrine which, more than any other, appears to be at the center of Alfarabi’s Plato, is that philosophy on its own is sufficient for achieving happiness. This doctrine, which Strauss attributes to Alfarabi, is rather incompatible with the primary impression one gets from reading Alfarabi’s treatise. Why does Strauss have a different interpretation of Plato? Let us follow his argument: In his treatise, Alfarabi explains that Plato’s investigations were guided by the question of the perfection of man, of his happiness. According to Alfarabi’s Plato, man’s perfection is inseparable from two things: a certain science and a certain way of life. Plato’s investigation led to the conclusion that the desired science is provided by philosophy and the desired way of life is the result of the royal or political art. Plato also concluded that the philosopher and the king are identical, and therefore these two arts are synthesized in the person of the philosopher-king. Plato defines philosophy as “the science of the essence of each of all beings,” as “the art of demonstration,” and therefore simply identifies the main subject and the method of philosophy as entirely different from the subject matter of political philosophy and its method. When Plato distinguishes between the science and the way of life which contribute to the perfection and happiness of man, the science which is philosophy proper is presented as a theoretical science, a science which only treats nonpolitical subjects. This science is discussed in the Timaeus, whereas the study of the way of life is presented as belonging to the practical art and is discussed in the Laws. This rather strict distinction between philosophy proper and political philosophy is called by Strauss “‘the aim’ of Plato” according to Alfarabi ( 10).

Strauss reminds us, however, that this understanding of philosophy is rather in conflict with the explicit teaching of Plato: the idea of philosophy as an unpolitical investigation is not compatible with the treatise under discussion because it is precisely in Plato that Alfarabi identifies philosophy with the royal art. First, Strauss responds that Alfarabi only identifies the “true” philosophy with the “true” royal art. He explains later on (footnote 28) that the “true philosophy” (al-falsafa ʻalā al-it. lāq / “philosophy simpliciter”), which unites both theoretical and practical perfection, is not philosophy proper, which only includes theoretical perfection. It is only in the perfect city that these two are united in the person of the philosopher-king, while in other imperfect cities, we see the royal art acting independently of philosophy. Strauss claims that even this statement is not very precise, and he continues with a discussion of three statements which Alfarabi makes concerning the relation between philosophy and the royal art ( 12): (1) the human being who is a philosopher (al-insān al-failasūf / homo philosophus) and the human being who is a prince (al-insān al-malik / homo rex) are the same thing. This first statement, according to Strauss, is not free of some ambiguities: the term “human being” is here explained by a reference to Aristotle, who attributes the philosopher’s virtuous actions to the fact that he, as a “human being,” lives together with other human beings and acts as a mere human being and not like a semi-divine contemplative being. It is also worthy of remark that this statement, Strauss mentions, happens to be found right at the middle of Plato (footnotes 27 and 35). Strauss also draws our attention to the fact that this statement is not prefaced by Alfarabi’s usual claim that “Plato investigated” this question, but is rather stated without any qualification; it is only “explained” by Plato. In any event, this statement does not mean what we usually believe: Alfarabi is only saying that a philosopher cannot acquire the unpolitical science of being without first acquiring the political science of the prince, and the prince cannot acquire the royal art without first acquiring the science of the philosopher. In other words, this ambiguous statement preserves the distinction between philosophy and the royal art. (2) In his central statement on the relationship between politics and philosophy, Alfarabi claims that according to Plato, the philosopher and the king each attain their perfection through the exercise of one faculty. It seems that in Strauss’s interpretation, each of these two attain their perfection through a different faculty, and therefore, the distinction between the science of the philosopher and the science of the prince is still present. (3) In the third statement, Alfarabi claims that the philosopher and the king have each one faculty, and these two faculties each provide, not only the science of the beings, but also the desired way of life. We therefore have two different faculties which provide for the one who possesses one of them, independently of other faculties, both the science of the beings and the science of way of life. In other words, in this statement, philosophy and the royal art seem to be “coextensive,” because each one of them can provide what is necessary for happiness. Strauss claims, however, that this does not mean that Alfarabi identifies philosophy with the royal art: they might be coextensive and even be equally sufficient for achieving the science and the way of life necessary for the happiness, but the fundamental distinction remains: philosophy is primarily directed toward the science of the beings, and the royal art is primarily directed toward the right way of life. But if Alfarabi thinks that philosophy and the royal art are two distinct faculties, why does he “hesitate” to say so “overtly”? Why does he “blur” the distinction between the theoretical character of philosophy and the practical character of the royal art? Why does Alfarabi give us the impression that philosophy can on its own provide the science of the beings as well as the right way of life, and also wants us to think that philosophy must be supplemented by something else in order to produce happiness? Why does Alfarabi make two incompatible and contradictory claims ( 13)?

Strauss claims that Alfarabi’s circumspection regarding the relationship between philosophy and the royal art is somehow connected with the relationship between human perfection and happiness; it therefore seems that these two are not the same. At first, it appears that for Alfarabi, philosophy provides the science of the beings, which realizes man’s perfection. This perfection is distinguished from happiness by the fact that only by the addition of the royal art, which produces the right way of life, can this perfection lead to happiness. In other words, although man can achieve his perfection through philosophy, philosophy in itself is not sufficient for attaining happiness. Strauss claims that identifying the philosopher and the king has for its objective a correction of this primary impression: if the philosopher and the king are identical, it means that philosophy and the royal art are also identical, and therefore philosophy, which now also contains the royal art, can lead not only to man’s perfection but also to his happiness. In other words, it seems that philosophy is now sufficient to produce happiness, and need not be supplemented by something else. Strauss does not claim that this is entirely satisfactory, because he says that Alfarabi leaves “the precise relation of philosophy to the royal art” in “doubt.” Alfarabi, however, makes it “perfectly clear” in his second and central statement that “philosophy by itself is sufficient to produce happiness” ( 14). But what does “philosophy” mean here? Is it divorced from the royal art, or does it include it? At first Strauss seems to suggest that it is difficult to explain why Alfarabi speaks “circumlocutorily about the relation of philosophy to the royal art,” although he finds it quite easy to explain why Alfarabi makes contradictory statements about “the relation of philosophy to happiness.” But right away, he explains that “the identification of philosophy with the royal art,” which he considered difficult to understand, is used by Alfarabi “as a pedagogic device.” This pedagogic device is used by Alfarabi for leading his select readers to his deeper view. This deeper view is that only theoretical philosophy – by itself and independently of anything else, including the royal art – leads to true happiness. Strauss qualifies this true happiness as a happiness “in this life,” because this is “the only happiness which is possible.” This last remark is somehow connected with Strauss’s reference to Maimonides: as Strauss explains, Maimonides distinguished between perfection and happiness and implies that happiness is the same thing as “eternal life” while perfection does not depend on life after death (footnote 32). But if this is Strauss’s last word on the subject, it would mean that perfection is the only thing available and happiness is impossible. Or to put it differently, perfection, which is attained through theoretical science, is the only true happiness.

Strauss calls this specific understanding of happiness “the consideration of speculative sciences” and points us toward Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas has argued that this kind of happiness, which he rejects, is the one defended by Aristotle. This is the “imperfect happiness, such as can be had in this life.” According to Aquinas, man’s true and final happiness is attained “through knowledge of something above the human intellect,” and consists of a happiness compatible with divine revelation and the idea of immortality. Strauss claims that the idea according to which true happiness consists of leisurely philosophical contemplation does not go as a matter of fact, but rather needs “some preparation and adjustment.” Plato and Aristotle could openly argue for such a view because they were under no compulsion to reconcile this temporal view of happiness “with the belief in the immortality of the soul or with the requirements of faith.” Medieval thinkers like Alfarabi were in a different position, and had to take the requirements of the predominant religion of their time into account. Regardless of these concessions to the ruling religion, Strauss claims that according to Averroes’s report, Alfarabi believed “that man’s only perfection consists of the speculative sciences,” and furthermore stated that “the dictum that man becomes a separate being is ‘an old women’s tale,’ since that which is generated and corruptible will not become eternal.”¹⁸

Alfarabi’s view of man’s ultimate happiness is not the only problematic point from the religious perspective. Strauss seems even to deny Alfarabi’s belief in the existence of anything supernatural ( 32). According to Alfarabi, philosophy as the science of the beings is above all the science of the natural beings (as distinguished from the artificial beings). But what about the supernatural beings? In his summary of the Timaeus, Alfarabi mentions divine beings alongside natural beings as the object of philosophy, which means that the divine things are not, strictly speaking, natural beings. In other words, the science of the natural beings seems different from the science of the divine beings. Strauss suggests two ways of reconciling these divergent statements: The first is to define the natural beings in a way that includes the divine beings. The divine beings are as natural as nondivine natural beings because they also do not owe their existence to human art. This way of making sense of Alfarabi’s divergent statements would also mean that in his summary of the Timaeus, mentioning the divine beings alongside the natural beings was simply superfluous or unnecessary. Strauss’s second solution is to explain Alfarabi’s statement by referring to the Timaeus. In that dialogue, Plato calls not only the maker of the universe and the traditional Greek gods divine, but also the universe, the heavens, and also the heavenly bodies themselves. Now, the idea of heavenly bodies as divine, a heretical position according to Muslim beliefs, is attributed by Averroes to Avicenna and his disciples; the view which, as Strauss explains elsewhere, seems to be particularly philosophical, as distinguished from “Abrahamic.”¹⁹ This would mean that by “divine” Alfarabi only means natural beings which are distinguished from other natural beings by their superior status: these divine beings are still natural, as they are bodies, or inhere in bodies. This would also mean that Alfarabi did not actually believe in the existence of supernatural or noncorporeal beings. Strauss surmises that this might explain his previous observation that Alfarabi is silent about incorporeal movers (the so-called intelligences), separate substances (i.e., beings that are not bodies and do not inhere in bodies), and about the ideas (another kind of noncorporeal beings) ( 32). The second way of explaining the divergent statements of Alfarabi is of course, as Strauss mentions, incompatible with other writings of Alfarabi, in which he famously refers to and discusses these incorporeal beings; but Strauss has already told us that these writings, in which Alfarabi speaks “in his own name,” do not have the same status as those writings in which Alfarabi presents the ideas of someone else.

There seems to be a problem with this claim of Strauss about Alfarabi’s view of the supernatural ( 33): in Alfarabi’s Plato there is one mention of “spiritual things,” that is, beings that are not bodies and do not inhere in bodies. But Strauss draws our attention to the fact that “things” are not exactly “beings,” although he has already told us that things, being qualities, relations, or products of beings, are dependent on beings. The existence of spiritual things therefore presupposes the existence of spiritual beings, the claim which Strauss fortifies with a reference to Plato’s Apology in which Socrates tries to refute the charge of atheism by saying that if he believes in daimonic things, he must also believe in daimons. Strauss skips a discussion of this question by saying “however this may be,” but the weakness of this Socratic counter-argument is rather obvious: one can believe in “spiritual things” or daimonic things and still not believe in the existence of spiritual beings or daimons, in the same way that one can believe in the existence of divine things (places of worship, religious rituals, religious texts, etc.) without believing in the existence of divine beings or gods.²⁰ Furthermore, Strauss advances three other points, all of which also amount to questioning Alfarabi’s belief in the existence of spiritual beings. First, Alfarabi mentions “spiritual things” only when presenting the common views of people different from Plato, the views of “the multitude.” Second, in the same context Alfarabi four times mentions “divine things,” three of which again are, Strauss claims, attributed to people other than Plato. In the only case in which he mentions divine things while presenting Plato’s investigation, according to Strauss (“I am inclined to believe,” see also “I do not know” [ 19]), these divine things are “identical with the science of the beings and the right way of life.”²¹ Third, it seems that Alfarabi uses the adjective “divine” as part of a dichotomy, the opposing element of which is human or bestial. In a subsequent passage, a similar dichotomy appears, in which “human” and “bestial” are the opposing poles. In other words, “divine” seems to be only a comparative category, used for qualifying the superior alternative without any supernatural connotation.²²

Alfarabi claims that the rule of the philosopher is the instrument through which the philosopher achieves his own happiness and produces happiness for all other human beings who are living under his rule in the virtuous city. As the virtuous city needs to be realized in this world, the question of the legislator becomes central. Here the legislator can simply be identified as the prophet, the founder of a revealed religion, and therefore Alfarabi’s view of happiness comes in line with the orthodox view: true happiness is only accessible through Revelation. Strauss draws our attention, however, to the fact that in Plato, contrary to Attainment of Happiness, the legislator is not explicitly identified with the prophet and the philosopher. Strauss claims that Alfarabi’s silence on this point is designed intentionally to make the unwary reader identify the legislator with the prophet and, one can add, with the philosopher. This is what Strauss considers Alfarabi’s “provisional solution,” his exoteric teaching. He thinks, however, that Alfarabi’s esoteric teaching is that the philosopher, legislator, and prophet are separate beings: the legislator and virtuous man are more closely akin, which explains why Strauss thinks that according to Alfarabi, “the function of the legislator is not the highest human perfection” ( 22).²³ The legislator of the best city does not have to be the prophet Muhammad, because apparently there are other “virtuous cities” founded by different legislators. What above all shows the difference between the philosopher on the one hand and the prophet and legislator on the other is what Strauss calls Alfarabi’s “final solution”: happiness does not require the establishment of the perfect political community, and perfect happiness is acquired through the science of beings, which is only accessible to philosophers. Considering the fact that this final solution seems incompatible with the idea of a divine legislator, it is not surprising that Alfarabi, in the guise of commenting on Platonic dialogues, denigrates the intellectual value of the science which deals with the study of Islamic Law, namely fiqh ( 18).

The most important point, however, which points toward Alfarabi’s heterodoxy is his view of the immortality of the soul. Strauss claims that the absence of the immortality of the soul in Alfarabi’s presentation of Plato’s philosophy, the doctrine which Strauss thinks must have been mentioned in Alfarabi’s short presentation of Platonic dialogues, points towards the fact that Alfarabi took this Platonic idea as an exoteric doctrine. One must bear in mind that Strauss’s attention to the question of immortality has a precedent: Al-Ghazali also accused philosophers of irreligion for denying the traditional view of the immortality of the soul.²⁴ Furthermore, the question of immortality occupies a unique position in Strauss’s essay, as shown in the epigraph of “Fârâbî’s Plato,” which is a quotation from Lessing. As this quotation points to some of the most important points mentioned in “Fârâbî’s Plato,” we shall now discuss it in more detail.

Immortality of the Soul

Lessing occupies a special place in Strauss’s writings. Strauss calls Lessing one of the freest minds of modernity and from whom Strauss claimed he has learned many things, including the art of esoteric writings.²⁵ Considering Strauss’s preoccupation with the question of esotericism in “Fârâbî’s Plato,” it is not surprising that he opens it with an epigraph from Lessing. He does not, however, explain the reasoning behind his selection of this specific epigraph. To understand the significance of this quotation, we should say a few words about the source of the epigraph, to which Strauss clearly points: Leibniz on Eternal Punishment, published in 1773. Lessing’s text consists of three parts: in the first part, Lessing informs his readers about the existence of a hitherto unpublished preface by Leibniz to a work by the Socinian Ernst Soner. In his work, Soner attacked the doctrine of eternal punishment, and Leibniz intended to republish Soner’s work while refuting his attack on eternal punishment in a preface. As Leibniz did not find the occasion to publish his preface along with Soner’s work, Lessing intends to publish this brief preface for the benefit of his readers and in defense of the orthodox view of eternal punishment, which he does in the second part of his essay.

Soner had argued that eternal punishment does not correspond to divine justice because a just god would not inflict an infinite punishment for a finite sin. As God is just, therefore, eternal punishment does not exist. In his short preface, published by Lessing for the first time, Leibniz tries to refute Soner’s view by arguing against the finitude of sin: the transgression of the sinner is infinite because there is an infinite afterlife in which the sinner continues to sin even after his death. This infinite sin merits an infinite punishment, and therefore a just god would punish the transgression of the sinner with eternal punishment. In the end, however, Leibniz’s preface proves to be a very minor affair: as Lessing reminds us, Soner’s work itself is long forgotten, and the same argument for eternal punishment has been presented in other writings of Leibniz. Shouldn’t he then, Lessing asks himself, have left Leibniz’s preface in obscurity? Lessing answers in the negative because his intention is to clarify “the attitudes and reasons which underlay” Leibniz’s defense of eternal punishment.²⁶ Now, the simple fact that Leibniz intended to republish a practically forgotten work which argues against the orthodox doctrine of eternal punishment is worthy of remark: we know, for instance, in the case of Spinoza’s writings, that one of the common ways for advertising unorthodox ideas was to republish the works containing such ideas while including some superficial refutation of those ideas supposedly to “protect” readers against dangerous perplexities.²⁷ We might therefore, like Leibniz’s contemporaries, to whom Lessing also alludes, suspect that, contrary to first impressions, Leibniz might have been sympathetic to Soner’s critique of eternal punishment. In any event, after quoting Leibniz’s unpublished brief preface in the second part of his text, Lessing’s job seems to be finished, but he continues making supplementary remarks in the third part of his work, in which he takes issue with one of Leibniz’s detractors. In fact, it seems that Leibniz’s short preface, which Lessing himself confesses is nothing new, as Leibniz has said the same thing in other works, serves as an occasion for a more important discussion. Surprisingly, Lessing tells us, he is not entirely convinced that Leibniz’s argument against Soner is conclusive; he even goes so far as to say that perhaps Leibniz refrained from publishing his preface because on further reflection he also found the argument unconvincing! But if Leibniz did not find his own argument convincing, why did he present it nonetheless in his other writings? Lessing claims that a writer can propose an argument that he finds unconvincing in another place because the “same thought can have an entirely different value in another place.” This is the passage which Strauss uses as the epigraph of “Fârâbî’s Plato.”

Lessing dedicates the third part of his work to a confrontation with one of Leibniz’s detractors, Johann August Eberhard. According to Eberhard, Leibniz did in fact oppose the doctrine of eternal punishment, and his defense of the orthodox view must be ascribed to Leibniz’s desire to acquire universal approval for his system of thought. To make his views agreeable to the orthodox readers, Eberhard claimed, Leibniz adapted them to their prejudices, one of them being their belief in eternal punishments. Lessing strongly opposes Eberhard’s view of Leibniz, but this without claiming that Leibniz really believed in this doctrine. Eberhard is mistaken because he has completely misunderstood Leibniz’s art of writing: Leibniz followed, Lessing claims, the venerable tradition of ancient philosophers who “in their exoteric pronouncements … tried to lead each individual along the path to truth” on which they found him.²⁸ In other words, according to Lessing, Leibniz does not merely practice his art of writing to gain followers or perhaps to protect himself against persecution; he also has a philanthropic intention.

Lessing concedes that Leibniz’s defense of the doctrine of eternal damnation is exoteric, and that “he would have expressed himself quite differently esoterically.” The doctrine of eternal punishment is the exoteric formulation of a “great esoteric truth,” namely that “nothing in the world is isolated, nothing is without consequences, and nothing is without eternal consequences.”²⁹ In this regard, eternal punishment is the consequence of sin. If the reader is shocked that Leibniz’s defense of eternal punishment has an entirely different meaning in this context and that his view is anything but orthodox, next Lessing mentions that even this view is “a mere possibility.” To the question of why one should frighten people with eternal punishment which is only a mere possibility, Lessing replies: why not frighten with it, since it can only be frightening to someone who has never been earnest about the betterment of himself?³⁰ It therefore seems that the salutary effects of the doctrine of eternal punishment are somehow more important than its truth. In fact, in Lessing’s comments it turns out that Hell does not exist, nor do the corporal punishments mentioned in Scripture! The punishments of which Scripture warns us, Lessing claims, are only the natural ones which would follow from sin; there is nothing supernatural about them. Those passages in Scripture which say otherwise exist because “the higher wisdom” considered that such extraordinary threats are necessary and recognized that it was salutary to express them purely in terms of our ordinary sensibilities, taking all its imagery from physical pain, which is more accessible to ordinary men.

Lessing claims that Leibniz’s doctrine of the best possible world does not mean that all human beings will eventually attain happiness. The gradual growth in perfection applies only to the general conditions of the whole, not to all individual beings. Leibniz’s presentation of his doctrine, as well as how others understood it, seem to be much more generous towards human beings. According to Lessing, this exoteric generosity, or rather philanthropy, should not hide the fact that for Leibniz the punishment of sinners does not lead to the correction of all human beings. Just like Socrates, who also believed in eternal punishment, “at least to the extent of considering it helpful to teach it in the most unexceptionable and explicit terms,” Leibniz “extends correction to those who merely witness the punishment, even if it has no effect on those who are themselves punished.”³¹ It seems that the threat of divine punishment is addressed to those human beings who need such frightening statements to mend their ways.

To resume, it seems that according to Lessing, Leibniz’s art of writing is designed to serve two groups of readers in equal measure: to guide the astute readers toward a more profound understanding of their perfection, and to educate the vulgar with unreal threats which are more suitable to their understanding. Now, these two different forms of esotericism are also present in Strauss’s essay, “Fârâbî’s Plato.” As esotericism can be practiced for different reasons, one might distinguish between protective esotericism, which has the objective of protecting the heterodox writer from persecution while guiding the potential philosophers towards the truth on the one hand, and a form of educative exotericism, which intends to replace the common unphilosophical ideas of the multitude with the truth or rather “an approximation to the truth” on the other ( 23). Strauss claims that Alfarabi’s statements about the political aspect of philosophy should not be considered “a mere stepping-stone” in Alfarabi’s argument. What Strauss means is that these statements have two functions: the first function corresponds to the defensive esotericism, which not only protects the heterodox philosopher but would also gradually lead his insightful readers to the idea that philosophy is the only way to happiness, that real happiness is only possible in this life, and that “the popular notions about the happiness of the other world” are erroneous. But the political statements have a second function, which corresponds to what we called educative esotericism. Strauss explains this by reminding us of the element which is common to both kinds of esotericism, namely the danger which philosophers’ necessary membership in a political society exposes them to. But while in protective esotericism, this danger leads to the philosopher’s caution in addressing the elite, in educative esotericism this danger leads to a different way of addressing “the vulgar,” who seem to be as much in need of philosophers’ guidance as the elite and potential philosophers. Learning how to educate the vulgar without endangering oneself was, according to Strauss’s reading of Alfarabi, the result of a major turn in Plato’s thought, a “correction of the Socratic attitude” ( 23). While Plato’s teacher Socrates, because of his “moral fervor,” had no other option but to either “comply” with the erroneous doctrines of his fellow citizens or to “openly challenge” them thereby risking persecution, Plato learned how to combine “the way of Socrates,” appropriate for dealing with the elite, with “the way of Thrasymachus,” appropriate for dealing with the vulgar. In other words, Plato, whose “moral fervor was mitigated by his insight into the nature of beings,” put aside the “revolutionary” and “uncompromising” attitude of Socrates and picked up a “conservative” way of action. This “insight into the nature of beings” perhaps has led to a better understanding of what is possible in politics and what is impossible and should be avoided. Plato’s conservative attitude consisted of “gradual” and step-by-step “replacement … of the accepted opinions by the truth or an approximation to the truth,” a gentle and imperceptible “undermining” or the “destruction of the accepted opinions.” The educative and protective esotericisms are in a sense two sides of the same coin, and both are born out of an awareness of the limits of politics, of an “insight into the nature of beings.” While the protective esotericism protects the philosopher who is teaching the truth to the select few, the educative esotericism protects the philosopher who is teaching “an approximation to the truth” or “an imaginative representation of the truth” to the vulgar. Strauss describes this form of political action as “the secret kingship of the philosopher” and distinguishes it from Socrates’s doctrine of the “philosopher-king who rules openly in the perfect city,” giving us the impression that this was Socrates’s real political program, perhaps due to his “uncompromising” and misguided “moral fervor.” Plato’s “secret kingship” is the middle ground between revolutionary overconfidence about the political effectiveness of philosophy, which leads to the direct participation of philosophers in the politics of the best regime, and total disregard for the political life of the city on the part of philosophers. It is the Platonic from of philosophical “philanthropy” which leads to the indirect influence of the philosopher “who lives privately as a member of an imperfect community.”³²

Now, it is interesting that this whole idea of educative esotericism, which guides the multitude toward salutary opinions, the idea to which Strauss points by including Lessing’s epigraph, is also present in a work by Averroes, to which Strauss also refers. In “Fârâbî’s Plato,” Averroes is mentioned seven times: six times by name ( 2, 5, footnote 39, footnote 41, footnote 58, footnote 93) and once without being named (footnote 43). The last reference to Averroes is to the work in which Averroes highlights the salutary character of the doctrine of immortality as the reason for the philosophers’ defense of this doctrine. Contrary to his practice of defending the philosophers against al-Ghazali’s religious charges through philosophical arguments, here Averroes bases his whole apology of the philosophers on the political necessity of this doctrine. The philosophers regard immortality “as most important and believe in it most,” according to Averroes, because it is “conducive to an order amongst men on which man’s being, as man, depends and through which he can attain the greatest happiness proper to him.” Such religious beliefs “lead towards wisdom in a way universal to all human beings” and seek “the instruction of the masses generally” while philosophy only addresses a few intelligent people who are capable of philosophizing. This also explains why the depiction of the afterlife in religion is more bodily than spiritual: such material depictions are more accessible to the real addressee of religious teachings, namely the multitude, than highly abstract spiritual depictions. Here Averroes goes so far in his defense of religious beliefs that he approves of al-Ghazali’s condemnation of the people who deny such salutary beliefs, those who are determined “to destroy the religious prescriptions and to undo the virtues.” Averroes joins al-Ghazali in calling such people “heretics” and will assure us that “both theologians and philosophers will no doubt kill them,” but alas “they have no actual power” to do so. In any event, Averroes states that “[w]hat Ghazali says against them is right.”³³

After discussing the question of immortality, Strauss writes that he would like to discuss a third example of Alfarabi’s heterodox ideas ( 18). It seems that the question of happiness and the immortality of the soul are the two examples already discussed. In other words, we receive another indication, apart from the epigraph of the text, that the question of immortality, being the second and central example, is of particular importance. The third example is the problematic place of the religious sciences, namely Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and dialectical theology (kalām) in Alfarabi’s thought. In Enumeration of the Sciences, the work in which Alfarabi “speaks in his own name,” these sciences are treated as parts of political science. According to Strauss, this way of treating religious sciences seems to mean three things: First, it seems that this is Alfarabi’s way of saying that Islam, as a revealed religion which is primarily a law regulating social life, comes “first into the sight of the philosopher as a political fact.” Second, Strauss claims that here it seems that Alfarabi, “as a philosopher … suspends his judgment as to the truth of the super-rational teaching of religion.” Third, one receives the impression that Alfarabi is trying to make room for a revealed theology, as distinguished from the natural theology of philosophers. Now, it is surprising that these three claims about the relationship between religious science and political science in the thought of Alfarabi are presented by Strauss, through the use of colons and phrases like “in other words,” as if they grow out of each other or are equivalent. It is true that Alfarabi’s treatment of the question suggests that Islamic Law and its related sciences are political phenomena and are treated as such; furthermore, it is true that Alfarabi tends to discuss religious questions in a way that suggests some form of detachment; it is also true that dialectical theology for Alfarabi is a form of revealed theology; in fact, it is what dialectical theology is. But these three facts are not the same; perhaps they are somehow connected, but Strauss does not explain how. In any event, Strauss now claims that these kinds of ambiguities disappear entirely in Plato, and Alfarabi, through “the mouth of Plato” declares that religious sciences do not lead to man’s highest perfection because these sciences cannot supply the science of the beings. Furthermore, religious knowledge in Plato is ranked lower than other sciences, even lower than linguistic sciences, although Strauss mentions that religious knowledge has something in common with language, because they are both specific to a particular community. To understand this whole laconic discussion, one should check two footnotes of this section. In the first footnote (41), Strauss draws our attention to the fact that, despite the low rank of the religious sciences, Alfarabi does not reject divine worship. In fact, Alfarabi recommends conformity with the laws and beliefs of the religious community in which one is brought up as a necessary qualification for the future philosopher. Strauss reminds us of the fact that here Alfarabi is following Plato, who also recommended such conformity. In other words, Alfarabi advises the philosopher to conform his acts to the common religious practices of his society while questioning, no doubt esoterically, the truth of these practices and the claims of that religion in general. Strauss claims that the full agreement of Alfarabi with Plato on this point appears after consulting three passages in Plato’s Timaeus, Seventh Letter, and Ion. Looking up these passages, one finds the idea that one must accept the common religious beliefs in Timaeus and Ion, but looking up the central reference to Seventh Letter (330e), one comes away empty-handed. Some might claim that it cannot be an accident that exactly in providing the central reference Strauss makes a mistake; such a reader would draw our attention to the fact that the mistaken reference is in fact significant, because Plato is there explaining that the philosopher should refrain from advising a city which does not heed his advice and threatens him with death. Furthermore, perhaps a reference to Plato’s works here is not even necessary: Strauss quotes from the editor of Plato, who has confessed that the view of divine worship presented in the work does not correspond to the Platonic view, but rather fits Alfarabi’s thought very well. The agreement of Alfarabi with Plato is furthermore underscored by a reference to the Apology, in which Socrates claims that he only possesses human wisdom, and divine wisdom is wholly inaccessible to him. Strauss claims that Alfarabi interpreted this Socratic claim not as Socrates’s denial of the truth of the divine wisdom, but rather as a way of specifying the modest status of his own wisdom. A reference to Averroes also clarifies that the divine wisdom meant here is the one “based on, or transmitted by, prophecy.” Now this whole discussion is problematic for several reasons: First, if we accept this supposedly Farabian understanding of the Socratic thesis, it means that contrary to Strauss’s earlier claim, Alfarabi did not have a negative view of the cognitive value of religious speculation; he rather simply claimed ignorance. Second, it is not clear where Alfarabi offers this interpretation of the Socratic thesis. Third, Strauss elsewhere explains that the Socratic claim of ignorance regarding divine wisdom is “a polite expression of his rejection of that wisdom.”³⁴ In the next footnote (42), Strauss makes a rather surprising claim: although Alfarabi, through the mouth of Plato, explicitly rejects the value of fiqh and kalām, “he is completely silent about the result of Plato’s examination of ‘religious speculation.’” Strauss continues: “‘religious speculation’ may well refer to mystical knowledge of God himself.” The meaning of this statement is that religious speculation is a form of intuition independent of logical deduction and syllogism. In the Neo-Platonic view this kind of knowledge is mainly attributed to God’s way of knowing things but also to “philosophers” in a mystical state. It seems that according to Strauss, Alfarabi’s reticence in discussing this type of knowledge is a way of dismissing the supra-rational claims and methods of the Neo-Platonic school with which Alfarabi is often identified. So much for Alfarabi’s supposed outspokenness. But one cannot say the same thing about Strauss.

One of the most impressive aspects of “Fârâbî’s Plato,” which distinguishes it from Strauss’s other writings, is its unique emphasis on unbelief and irreligiosity. It is true that Strauss does not call Alfarabi an atheist, but he leaves no doubt that Alfarabi rejected Islam and considered its claims to truth entirely worthless. Now, it is true that Strauss attributes the same irreligious perspective to many other philosophers, but nowhere else do we see Strauss speaking so emphatically with an approving tone of a philosopher who he clearly depicts as an unbeliever. Here two relevant examples come to mind. Regardless of his sympathetic evaluation of Machiavelli, in Thoughts on Machiavelli Strauss clearly employs a condemnatory voice which has even distorted readers’ understanding of Strauss’s position right from the beginning.³⁵ “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” the second example which comes close to Strauss’s outspokenness about the philosophers’ unbelief in “Fârâbî’s Plato,” also contains passages in which Strauss speaks with his usual balanced and ambiguous position regarding the question of Reason and Revelation.³⁶ Some have claimed that Strauss’s outspoken and very sympathetic depiction of Alfarabi’s unbelief is rhetorical. According to this view, Strauss is in a sense exaggerating this aspect of Alfarabi’s thought, giving us a presentation of Alfarabi’s unbelief in a “graceless and unrestrained manner” which is “remarkable for its lack of subtlety” and fails to give “moderation its due” in order to counter the common prejudice regarding Islamic philosophy as an eclectic mixture of religion and philosophy.³⁷ One can question this view of Strauss’s essay, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” by referring to the fact that it seems Strauss somehow saw the situation completely differently in all his other writings, which deal with the conflict of Reason and Revelation. In all those other writings, Strauss is always more emphatic about the claims of Revelation. We should therefore say that Strauss’s most authoritative observation about his intellectual context was that belief is much more in need of support than unbelief. Considering this point, one should rather say that Strauss’s way of writing in “Fârâbî’s Plato” encourages common intellectual prejudices, which tend to favor unbelief and Reason rather than belief and Revelation. Is it the reason why Strauss decided against the republication of his essay? What does it then say about Strauss’s other writings, which emphatically invite us to be “open to the challenge of theology,” which seem to even go so far as to depict a conflict of Reason and Revelation in which Revelation has the upper hand? Is it possible that “Fârâbî’s Plato,” this very personal and unique writing of Strauss, depicts more authentically Strauss’s genuine positions than those repeated statements of his? Is it not significant that in the revised version of “Fârâbî’s Plato” in the Introduction of Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss’s most emphatic and personal statement on Alfarabi’s unbelief is absent?³⁸

What Is Philosophy?

With his esoteric reading of Plato, Strauss intends to prove that Alfarabi’s view of happiness and his rejection of the supernatural, prophecy, Islamic jurisprudence, and immortality of the soul mean that he cannot be considered a Muslim philosopher. Strauss is, however, aware of the fact that his claims about Alfarabi’s philosophy are highly dependent on esoteric techniques of reading, and are therefore controversial. Some might claim that in Plato, Alfarabi is expounding the views, not of himself, but rather that of “other men” who were non-Muslim “pagans” ( 19). One can then explain away the problematic points in Alfarabi’s exposition of Plato’s philosophy by the fact that he “as a commentator, or as a historian” is bound to present the ideas of his subject faithfully without indicating his disagreement with the ideas presented in his commentary or historical work. Strauss therefore hypothesizes that Alfarabi, “as a pupil of philosophers,” a faithful follower of Plato, may have disagreed with the ideas of his teachers “as a believer.” But right away he rejects such a possibility by qualifying Alfarabi as a “philosopher” who cannot have been so “confused” as to at the same time subscribe to contradictory ideas: perhaps he could not have been a “philosopher” and also a “believer” at the same time. Such a contradictory stance has been traditionally ascribed to the so-called Latin Averroists: Could Alfarabi have been a Latin Averroist avant la lettre? But the difference between the Latin Averroists and Alfarabi is rather evident: the former expounded a heretical teaching faithfully, while Alfarabi seems rather strict about avoiding a literal presentation of Plato’s ideas, which are rather tolerable from the believer’s point of view. A “mere commentator of Plato” who intends to be a faithful expositor of Plato’s ideas would not ignore Plato’s “tolerably orthodox doctrine concerning the life after death” in his presentation, but this is precisely what Alfarabi does. According to Strauss, this “flagrant deviation from the letter of Plato’s teaching” more than “any explicit statement of his” proves that he did not believe in the afterlife and that he considered the Platonic doctrine of immortality false. It would therefore mean that any statement of his in defense of immortality and life after death in his other writings, in which he speaks in his own name, must be considered “as prudential accommodations to the accepted dogma.” This is also the case in what “the commentator, or historian” Alfarabi says about religious sciences, because it is difficult to see how “a believing Muslim” could have found a critique of fiqh in Plato’s writings. In fact, Alfarabi is only a figure who exemplifies “the genuine philosopher” for Strauss, the philosopher who “can never become a genuine convert to Judaism or to any other revealed religion.”³⁹ Considering these points, Strauss can claim that he has proved that none of three terms applied to Alfarabi are a faithful description of his thought: he is neither a straightforward Aristotelian, nor a Neo-Platonist, nor an orthodox Muslim. He is a philosopher. But what is philosophy and who is a philosopher?

This question can be described as one of the main themes or even the theme of “Fârâbî’s Plato.” Strauss repeatedly defines philosophy according to Alfarabi as the science of the essence of all beings. It is “the science of Timaeus,” a theoretical science or art par excellence, which is fundamentally distinguished from the practical arts. It is also “the way leading to theoretical science.” In other words, philosophy is the actual investigation of beings which leads to that science and also science itself. This definition of philosophy is also connected with what Alfarabi means by “Plato’s philosophy,” or what Strauss calls its “precise meaning” – the unpolitical science of the essence of all beings ( 11). This meaning of philosophy is not incompatible with Alfarabi’s first definition of Plato’s philosophy, that is, with the essentially political investigation of happiness. It is true, Strauss argues, that the philosopher, in the quest for the essence of all beings, must transcend the sphere of moral or political things, but he should also give an account of his doing so. He should justify his philosophical investigation. As the context of this investigation is the political society, the justification transforms itself to the political justification of philosophical investigation, to the question of “what is the right way of life?” This justification, which is “merely preliminary,” is in a sense, Strauss claims, philosophic because “only the philosopher is competent to elaborate that question and to answer it.” Despite the preliminary character of this exercise, philosophy as the quest for the truth about the whole cannot be separated from it, from the self-knowledge which grounds the need for such a knowledge and clarifies “the difficulties obstructing its discovery and its communication” ( 11). Here, “communication” refers to the question of esotericism. Strauss reiterates, however, that philosophic investigation and this preliminary step “do not belong to the same level” and, as Strauss mentioned before, they have “different ranks.” It is even more reasonable to say that this self-knowledge is not, properly speaking, a part of philosophy and must therefore be distinguished from it. This is reflected in the fact that in Plato, contrary to Alfarabi’s other writings, philosophy does not consist of separate theoretical and practical parts. In other words, although philosophy has a direct connection with political philosophy, which acts as a preliminary to theoretical science proper, philosophy is essentially a theoretical pursuit. This understanding of philosophy sounds rather traditional. One should not, however, conclude that Alfarabi’s understanding of philosophy, or rather Strauss’s understanding of it, is traditional.

The untraditional view of philosophy presented by Strauss is reflected above all in the last paragraph of “Fârâbî’s Plato.” After a dense evaluation of Alfarabi’s view of the supernatural, which leads to the rather radical conclusion that Alfarabi did not believe in the existence of such beings, Strauss confesses that his observations are far from being the last word on Alfarabi’s view of the supernatural or incorporeal substances. They do not “suffice” to make a definitive judgment about Alfarabi’s view of these sensitive subjects. One can perhaps add that in these types of esoteric readings of the works of philosophers which Strauss pursues, this kind of uncertainty must always be expected. Strauss himself implies the same thing by saying that although “a man such as” Alfarabi “doubtless” had “definite convictions” on some subjects, it is not easy to say what these convictions were. But, surprisingly, Strauss believes that his observations “suffice” to substantiate the claim that Alfarabi’s “philosophy does not stand and fall with the acceptance of such [supernatural or incorporeal] substances.” What Strauss means is that these doctrines do not play a particularly important role in Alfarabi’s philosophy. What is fundamental in Alfarabi’s philosophy is the “spirit” in which he pursues his research, not his “convictions.”⁴⁰ That spirit is what Alfarabi has in common with other philosophers, even with a “philosophic materialist,” while that spirit distinguishes him from any “non philosophic believer.” Philosophy, in all its forms, is therefore strictly distinguished from belief.⁴¹ The philosophical spirit consists of pursuing the science of all beings and not the science of the various ways of life. In other words, Alfarabi’s view of philosophy is “essentially and purely” theoretical and not political. Philosophy is the “way leading to” the science of all beings; it is “the actual investigation of things which leads to that science” and not that science itself.

This view of philosophy, which Strauss identifies with the original sense of skepsis (meaning speculation, inquiry, and examination but also doubt and hesitation), is rather unique. One gets the impression that, according to Strauss, science which is pursued by the philosopher is wholly beyond our grasp, and philosophy should be only considered an endless “quest for truth” without any expectation of ever achieving that truth. This seems to be why elsewhere Strauss can describe philosophy, “when one contrasts its achievement with its goal,” as “Sisyphean.”⁴² The endlessness of the quest seems to be due to the fact that if one resists the temptation to accept any conviction which is “unevident or unproven,” there will be not much left; there will always be doubts about and objections to any proposed solution. Despite the endlessness and apparently fruitlessness of this quest, Strauss finds it so valuable that he calls it the only thing which makes “life worth living.” In a way, Strauss’s interest in Plato shows his own preference for such a view of philosophy.⁴³ When describing Alfarabi’s procedure in presenting Plato’s philosophy, Strauss distinguishes it from other procedures. The first procedure which Alfarabi does not follow is that which presents the final Platonic teachings. According to Strauss, Alfarabi’s procedure is not teaching oriented; this also seems to be one of the reasons why, to reconcile his Platonism with his adherence to Aristotle, Alfarabi did not try to present the identity of the esoteric doctrine of Plato and Aristotle ( 6). The image of Alfarabi that appears in Strauss’s essay is a rather curious one: Strauss seems to be particularly interested in modeling a philosopher without any substantial philosophical doctrine or dogma, a philosopher only interested in philosophical inquiry itself. He does not seem like someone who promotes some specific doctrine, even on subjects which appear prominent in Strauss’s presentation. For instance, Strauss claims that Alfarabi was an unbeliever, but Strauss does not seem to have discovered Alfarabi’s specific refutation of Revelation. All that Strauss seems to care about is that Alfarabi rejects the claims of revealed religion in favor of a superior life of inquiry and zetetic philosophy. In fact, these two ideas, the rejection of Revelation and the superiority of the philosophic life, which are clearly connected, seem to be the only positive doctrines attributed to Alfarabi by Strauss.⁴⁴ It is difficult to describe precisely what this zetetic philosophy is. It can rather be described negatively, by what it is not. It is not dogmatic philosophy: dogmatic philosophy is the philosophy which not only presupposes that the solution for, at least, the most important questions is achievable, but also claims to have discovered it. In a sense, most philosophers, as long as we believe that they have offered definitive answers to decisive questions, have been dogmatic. Zetetic philosophy is also different from skeptical philosophy in the traditional sense of the term. Skeptics presuppose that ultimate solutions to the most important questions are beyond our reach. Zetetic philosophy seems to have something in common with dogmatism as well as with skepticism: it shares dogmatism’s trust in our powers to solve the ultimate problems, but it also shares skepticism’s mistrust in the given answers and entertains a rather radical dissatisfaction with them. If one looks closely, one is tempted to say that zetetic philosophy is much closer to skepticism than to dogmatism. The crucial point seems to be that zetetic philosophy keeps alive the hope for reaching a solution, or rather does not reject out of hand the possibility of such a solution. Whether this is entirely satisfying as a distinctive characteristic is not entirely clear. One can perhaps say that zetetic philosophy in practice is not distinguishable from skepticism: they both hardly propose any definitive answer to our questions. Zetetic philosophy does not offer a solution without in the same breath mentioning its provisional character and its deficiencies. The fact itself that according to Strauss “the questions are clearer than the answers” gives us the impression that no clear answer to those questions is achievable, and that we will always be dealing with questions. If one considers the unfinished character of the philosophy which Strauss describes as only a description of its current state, one can maintain the difference between skepticism and zetetic philosophy. But if what Strauss is pointing at is a claim about the essential capacities of philosophy and its future results, then one must say that zetetic philosophy cannot be distinguished from skepticism. Perhaps the most radical and also the most impressive depiction of this view is presented by Strauss in the following words, where the possibility of the properly philosophic knowledge, that is, demonstrative knowledge, is implicitly denied:

Philosophy is concerned with understanding reality in all its complexity. Its complexity may preclude demonstrative answers to the fundamental questions: the arguments in favor of the various incompatible answers may be inconclusive. This would not make the philosophic enterprise futile: for the philosopher, full understanding of a problem is infinitely more important than any mere answer. What counts from the philosophic, i.e., the theoretical, point of view, is the articulation of the subject matter as an articulation supplied by the argument in favor of two contradictory answers rather than the answers themselves. Philosophy in its original sense is disputative rather than decisive. Disputation is possible only for people who are not concerned with decisions, who are not in a rush, for whom nothing is urgent except disputation.⁴⁵

One of the main differences between skepticism and zeteticism seems to be that the hopelessness, or rather dogmatic and a priori despair of skepticism, does not provide the necessary encouragement for the quest for the truth. How can one seriously bear the effort of seeking the truth if one knows beforehand that it is not achievable? Or, can one say that the activity of the philosopher finds its source of energy elsewhere? In a short paragraph ( 24) which Strauss calls a “conclusion” but which is actually a bridge to the next paragraphs, Strauss draws our attention to the disagreement of Alfarabi’s Plato with Socrates. The distinction between perfection and happiness points to this disagreement because “happiness is not simply identical with human perfection or its exercise” but is only achieved when that perfection is accompanied by the highest pleasure. According to Strauss, Alfarabi points toward the fact that this is Plato’s view and not Socrates’s by writing that the Platonic dialogue which praises pleasure is “attributed to Socrates,” or as Strauss puts it, “merely attributed” to Socrates. Strauss attributes Socrates’s lack of interest in pleasure to his “moralism.” As the status of morality is now in question, Strauss begins a discussion of the “relation of philosophy to morals” in Alfarabi’s Plato. He explains Alfarabi’s critique of the moral life or “the virtuous life” by referring to a passage in which Alfarabi writes that “the virtuous way of life is what leads to the achievement of this happiness.” According to Strauss’s reading, “this happiness” is here the “apparent happiness,” as distinguished from the “true happiness.” Strauss uses Falaquera’s translation of this passage in which “this happiness” is translated as “the happiness of this world” to conclude that the true happiness, to which the virtuous way of life does not lead, is “the happiness of the other world,” the happiness which is superior to the apparent happiness, to the happiness of this world ( 25). Here again Maimonides helps Strauss to claim that, according to Alfarabi, the virtuous way of life is in the service of “the well-being of the body” while “the well-being of the soul” is produced by philosophical contemplation “alone.” If the last qualification is taken literally, it means that morality does not contribute anything to “the true happiness,” “the happiness of the other world,” or “the well-being of the soul.” Strauss knows that these claims, which are greatly dependent on extraneous sources, are in need of confirmation in Alfarabi’s text. He should, however, confess that Alfarabi does not say what the desired way of life is; at most, Alfarabi says what “it is not,” and even this is not said explicitly. What Alfarabi says explicitly is that the desired way of life is supplied by the royal art, which later on is implicitly identified with philosophy. But how can philosophy as a theoretical art be considered a practical art? This is possible, Strauss claims, “if contemplation itself is the highest form of action” ( 26). According to Strauss, Alfarabi’s reticence on these points has led translators to misunderstand and mistranslate his writing. He attributes mistakes of translators to Alfarabi’s intentional misdirection and reticence, which have an esoteric character. Strauss claims that Alfarabi “wanted to be understood by the majority of his readers in exactly the same way in which he has been understood by his modern translators.” In what concerns the question of morality, the obscurity of the passages which discuss the desired way of life is designed to give the majority of the readers the impression that the desired way of life is the virtuous way of life. Alfarabi succeeds in misleading most of his readers without even making the claim that the desired way of life is the virtuous way of life by relying on a common predisposition of theirs. Alfarabi knew that the majority of his readers would miss his reticence and would read in his obscure passage a defense of morality, because Alfarabi agreed with Montesquieu that men “love morality,” that “in every country in the world morality is desired,” and because the majority of readers themselves identify the desired way of life with the virtuous way of life (footnote 76). Strauss is now ready to substantiate his claim that according to Alfarabi, the virtuous life is mainly in the service of the happiness of this world and the well-being of the body – the claim he previously substantiated by referring to Falaquera and Maimonides; this time he will do so by referring to Alfarabi’s own writing. He finds the evidence for this claim in a passage in which Alfarabi rejects the claim of the practical arts to provide the desired knowledge and the way of life necessary for happiness. These practical arts only provide the useful, necessary things and the gainful things. The gainful things are also identical with virtuous things. If Alfarabi rejects the idea that the practical arts provide the desired way of life, and if the virtuous things are the result of the practical arts, it means that the desired way of life cannot be the virtuous way of life, because the virtuous way of life is also a virtuous thing. Moreover, the fact that virtuous things are put side by side with the gainful things means that they are all in the service of the well-being of the body and the happiness of man in this world.

Alfarabi’s critique of morality is not the complete rejection of every notion of virtue and nobility. Strauss explains that Alfarabi’s rejection of the virtuous way of life and his denigration of what is useful, gainful, and virtuous or noble is only a way to distinguish what is truly useful, gainful, and virtuous or noble from what the many believe to be so. Alfarabi is actually promoting the truly gainful and virtuous things, which are the philosophic life and the science of the beings, and the truly useful, which is philosophy. In other words, it seems that Alfarabi is arguing for something much less controversial, namely that the philosophic life is the truly virtuous way of life, and that the true virtues and noble things are different from those believed by the multitude. Strauss intends, however, to prevent us from concluding that Alfarabi is only making a rather banal claim, which amounts to saying that the multitude is mistaken about true morality and the virtuous life. Alfarabi’s view is as radical as it can be: he refrains from identifying the desired way of life with the virtuous way of life because he does not wish to give us the impression that he wishes to replace the multitude’s “lower morality” with “the highest morality,” the vulgar lax moral standards with a stricter morality ( 30). Alfarabi believes that the virtuous way of life known to the vulgar is in fact moral, while the truly virtuous way of life which he advocates is not strictly speaking moral. What Strauss is driving at is that in morality the decisive consideration is to act morally, to do the moral action for its own sake and not for its benefits, while in the type of virtuous action which Alfarabi promotes, the virtuous action is born out of knowledge, and the virtuous action is done because reason recommends it. It may be, which is actually true in many cases, that “the conduct of moral man and that of the philosopher” are the same. But this external appearance should not lead us to confuse the truly moral action and the action of the philosopher, which is born out of knowledge. This is the reason why Alfarabi refrains from identifying the desired way of life with the virtuous way of life.

Philosophy and History

The title of “Fârâbî’s Plato” seems to be a reflection of the way in which Strauss refers to the edition which he is using.⁴⁶ But he also uses this expression, without the italicized “Plato,” nine times.⁴⁷ One is therefore tempted to interpret the title as more than an ordinary reference to Alfarabi’s treatise: Who is “Farabi’s Plato” as distinguished from “Plato”? Could the title mean that “Farabi’s Plato” is different from “the historical Plato”? In the same vein, the question of Plato as a historical work and Alfarabi as a historian is one of the major themes of Strauss’s essay. Strauss draws our attention to the fact that in his short treatise on the philosophy of Plato, Alfarabi does not engage in a “historical study” of the development of Plato’s thought ( 6). The fact that Alfarabi presents Plato’s philosophy without regard to Socrates or to his other predecessors shows how much Alfarabi was not concerned with history (footnote 7). What Alfarabi is concerned with above all is Plato’s “investigations,” and he tries to show “the inner and necessary sequence” of those investigations by assigning to each step one Platonic dialogue. Strauss confesses that what Alfarabi says about some of the dialogues sounds “fairly fanciful.” He knows that Alfarabi certainly did not have access to some of those dialogues, and his indirect knowledge of them might have been distorted by the secondary sources. But, he asserts, it is “unimportant” what Alfarabi thought about those dialogues to which he did not have access: what is more important is what he thought about Plato’s philosophy as a whole, which he knew from the Republic, Timaeus, and the Laws. Strauss thinks that Alfarabi was not a “commentator” or a “historian,” at least not in the ordinary sense of the term, because if he was one, we should expect him to expound with the greatest care all the doctrines of Plato. Strauss’s Alfarabi is so much a nonhistorian that he even goes so far as to attribute a critique of fiqh to Plato ( 19, 20). If Alfarabi was “a mere commentator of Plato” who followed his teacher to the letter, he must have been almost compelled to embrace a tolerably orthodox doctrine concerning life after death. But Alfarabi does the reverse by his silence.⁴⁸

Strauss argues that Alfarabi occupies an ambiguous position as a commentator: as a commentator, his end or objective in commenting on Plato’s works seems to be to expound and explain Plato’s views on different subjects. One might suppose that this end is as compatible with expounding Plato’s erroneous views as with Plato’s true views. In this regard, one might say that the ideal commentator that Alfarabi should have imitated is a faithful conveyer of a doctrine that he might find true or false. But this is precisely what Strauss denies. Strauss’s Alfarabi is far from such an ideal commentator, so much so that the reader must consider him an unreliable narrator, an unfaithful and untrustworthy commentator of Plato who must be disbelieved on every point. Strauss claims that Alfarabi presents his own controversial views precisely in those works in which he “sets forth not so much his own views, as the views of someone else” ( 17). Those works are precisely commentaries in which Alfarabi pretends to be a faithful conveyer of the views of someone else, to be a historian. But why would Alfarabi resort to such practices and betray the confidence of his reader who expects him, as a true commentator, to transmit the teaching of other writers faithfully and free of distortions? The obvious answer would be that Alfarabi resorts to such distortions and declares heretical ideas through “the mouth of Plato” to avoid persecution, and this is what Strauss claims ( 18). In other words, Alfarabi avails himself of “the specific immunity of the commentator, or of the historian, in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters” ( 20). This is therefore the first reason for considering Plato a nonhistorical work: writing a pseudo-historical commentary is an esoteric technique. Through commentary one can make heterodox claims by attributing one’s ideas to the text one is explaining. In this case, Plato is unhistorical, because it serves as a vehicle for Alfarabi’s own teaching. As radical as Strauss’s claim might seem, this is not Strauss’s whole or even most fundamental claim.

In a fundamental digression, Strauss makes a much more radical claim about the place of historical research and the activity of commentary in Alfarabi’s thought.⁴⁹ In that digression, Strauss provides two supplementary reasons for the nonhistorical character of Plato. He does that by first explaining that Alfarabi deviates from the letter of Plato’s teaching if “he considers that literal teaching erroneous” ( 21). This leads to the second reason for which Alfarabi might have presented Plato’s teaching in an unhistorical fashion: Alfarabi might have believed that, for instance, the doctrine of ideas and the immortality of soul are merely exoteric teachings of Plato. In that case, Alfarabi refrains from conveying these teachings in his commentary if he believes that “Plato himself considered the doctrines in question merely exoteric.” This second reason for the unhistorical character of Plato is obviously a rather straightforward case of esoteric reading of Plato’s writings by Alfarabi. But abruptly Strauss introduces us to another, third reason for Alfarabi’s deviations: Alfarabi’s “historical” writing on Plato is “not a historical work,” not only because Alfarabi puts his own words in Plato’s mouth to protect himself, and not only because he believed in the exoteric character of some of the literal teachings of Plato – Alfarabi also provides a historically incorrect picture of Plato’s ideas, Strauss claims, because he “may” have believed that a given “Platonic teaching” is not “the true teaching” ( 21). To put it differently, Alfarabi does not hesitate to deviate from Plato’s exoteric or esoteric teaching of Plato if he believes that that teaching is incorrect, and this even if he believes Plato actually adhered to that erroneous doctrine. We are here completely outside of the common-sensical understanding of the work of a commentator.

According to Strauss, Alfarabi, in his commentary on Plato, “presents not so much the historical Plato, as the typical philosopher.” This typical philosopher, as much as he is “assisted” by his teachers, charts “his own way.” It seems that according to Strauss, the end of this Platonic commentator is not so much the transmission of the historical truth, but rather the transmission of the results of his own philosophical activity. A Platonic commentator employs the form of commentary only as an instrument of philosophizing. Strauss also sees a connection between Alfarabi’s unhistorical work and the historical Plato, between Plato’s dialogues and the historical Socrates, and between the Platonic Socrates and the historical Egypt. Alfarabi’s Plato is unhistorical in the same way that Platonic dialogues do not represent the historical Socrates, and in the same way that Socrates does not describe the real Egypt to his interlocutors. Regarding Socrates and Egypt, Strauss quotes (footnote 48) a Platonic passage which he revises to fit this context. But Strauss also does not quote the last part of that passage: “Socrates, you easily make Egyptian speeches – and speeches from whatever country you wish.” Just after this passage, in the same dialogue, Socrates criticizes Phaedrus for this sarcastic comment by saying that men in former times were ready to hear something as long as it was true, regardless of who said it, while the people today care more about the source than the truth of the saying.

Plato, as he is presented by Alfarabi, is not “the historical Plato” but rather “Farabi’s Plato,” a Plato fashioned and created by Alfarabi. A true Platonist, Strauss claims, is not concerned with the historical truth but rather with the truth simply. However, considering the fact that Strauss here quotes Descartes, one must conclude that Alfarabi is here depicting a typical philosopher simply, Platonist and non-Platonist. This typical philosopher is concerned with discovering the truth on his own rather than with being the truthful conveyer of the teachings of somebody else. In this regard, there is practically no difference between commentary and treatise because they are both instruments in the service of the philosophic life: with the former, the philosopher philosophizes in the guise of a historical account, and with the latter, the philosopher philosophizes in the open. And as the activity of philosophy is fundamentally problematic and exposed to persecution, commentary is the preferred mode of philosophizing because the true philosopher does not care about being recognized as the original source of an idea. For him the truth is in the end fundamentally “anonymous.” Strauss believes that for Alfarabi, or rather for every philosopher, philosophy is the way leading to the science of all beings rather than the science itself, “the investigation rather than the result.” Alfarabi’s Platonic style of commentary is the incarnation of that investigation which is called the philosophic life.

In any event, one must also remind oneself of the fundamentally problematic character of philosophizing in the guise of a commentary: there is a kind of falsehood at the heart of the whole enterprise of pretending to convey someone else’s thoughts and instead presenting one’s own views. But Strauss claims that this is precisely what public speech demands: “a mixture of seriousness and playfulness” ( 21). It is playful for one to pretend to be commenting on the writing of an old philosopher while philosophizing on one’s own. It is playful to make “fanciful remarks on the purport of various dialogues” as if one is seriously providing the summary of those dialogues. This, according to Strauss, explains some peculiarities of Plato: for instance, Alfarabi’s Plato seems entirely without “philosophic predecessors,” as if he was “the first philosopher,” and this despite the fact that Alfarabi must have known from the sources at his disposal that this is not true – in fact, according to Strauss, Alfarabi intimates this knowledge in some of the passages of Plato – for instance, in his summary of the Menexenus. Now, Strauss’s whole reading is based on an important supposition: that Alfarabi had access to the historical material which is at our disposal. Only by presupposing this access can Strauss find the absence of some doctrines in Alfarabi’s presentation of Plato’s philosophy intentional and therefore significant. Strauss calls this a major concern for “the historian” who studies Alfarabi’s work. Strauss reminds us of “the non-historical purpose of the Plato,” which makes such historical questions irrelevant. Alfarabi’s unfamiliar descriptions of the Platonic dialogues have a “non-historical purpose”; they are perhaps meant to teach “an important philosophic truth.” Strauss, here speaking as a “historian,” argues that Alfarabi’s access to the sources is not decisive because even if Alfarabi only repeated what he read in a lost epitome, he took full responsibility for the content of his own presentation.⁵⁰ Furthermore, the fact that Alfarabi decided to present his own thoughts “in the guise of a historical account” is important for understanding his view of his own “contribution” to the philosophical tradition: he subordinates the individual understanding of the philosopher to the “necessarily anonymous” character of the philosophic truth. Strauss describes Alfarabi as “a true Platonist,” a Platonist who is only concerned with philosophical truth, in contradistinction to “historical (accidental) truth.” He refers us here to Protagoras and Charmides (footnote 49). The passage in Charmides is clearly about the anonymous character of truth: Socrates explains the philosophic method by saying that “the question at issue is not who said it, but whether what he said is true or not.” The reference to Protagoras, however, seems to have a different objective. In this part of the dialogue, Socrates asks the interlocutors to leave “odes and poetry,” and instead concentrate on their search for the philosophical truth, because such discussions about the meaning of poems and the real intention of the poet Simonides, namely historical questions, are for Socrates unimportant, vulgar, and childish frivolities. Serious investigators should avoid such extraneous voices because such thinkers “cannot be questioned on what they say,” and their real meaning remains elusive. Here everyone has “a different opinion about what he means, and they wind up arguing about something they can never finally decide.” In other words, while the reference to the Charmides concerns the anonymity of the truth, the reference to Protagoras is about what we might call the problem of historiography. The question of historical truth, as Strauss indicates by his references, can distract us from the real philosophical questions, because when a historical truth, for instance concerning the verses of a poet, becomes the topic of discussion, people often become entangled in a useless discussion about the meaning of those verses, an argument about something which can never be decided and only distracts one from the search for philosophical truth. This is why Strauss concludes his complex discussion of Alfarabi’s view of the divine by saying that it “would be rash to maintain that the foregoing observations suffice for establishing what Farabi believed as regards any substantiae separatae” ( 34). This lack of certainty about Alfarabi’s real position is later expanded to his whole philosophy, as Strauss claims that “Fârâbî doubtless had definite convictions concerning a number of important points, although it is not as easy to say what these convictions were.” This again seems to be as true for Alfarabi as for any other philosopher or “man such as Fârâbî,” particularly those who practice esotericism. It seems that Strauss holds the view that there is some kind of unbreachable barrier which separates the thought of people like Alfarabi from their readers and commentators, the barrier which makes every certainty about their true convictions impossible.⁵¹ As Strauss understands it, the true task of the philosopher is to set these kinds of historical questions aside for a genuine philosophical quest. The work of commentary is not unlike philosophy itself, in which the questions are more evident than the answers. With enough care and effort, one can discover which question a philosopher tries to answer, but one might not be able to discover the answer of that author, especially if one believes there is an esoteric art of writing present in the work, the art of writing which always opens the way to a multiplicity, if not an infinity, of possible interpretations.

On the “Introduction” of Persecution and the Art of Writing

In the preface of his 1952 work Persecution and the Art of Writing, the book which brought together formerly published essays from 1941, 1943, and 1948, Strauss writes that for the introduction of the whole book he has “made free use” of his “Fârâbî’s Plato.” This claim, which, as Heinrich “has no counterpart in all his other work,” sounds like an invitation to compare these two writings.⁵² Strauss begins his introduction with the claim that the subject of his book falls into the province of the sociology of knowledge, and shows his dissatisfaction with this field of study because it does not include the sociology of philosophy, which should study the relationship between philosophy as such and society as such. Strauss’s book intends to remedy this gap in the scientific literature on the sociology of knowledge. To find the necessary material for the study of this new field, Strauss had to turn to other ages and lands, more precisely to the Jewish and Islamic philosophy of the middle ages. Strauss draws our attention next to the poverty of our understanding of Jewish and Islamic philosophy compared with that of Christian scholasticism. The latter is more at home in our age, while the former suffers from a grave misunderstanding which hides the tumultuous relationship between philosophy and society. Judaism and Islam, contrary to Christianity, are religions of law rather than faith; they have therefore a more pronounced political character. Islamic and Jewish philosophy as a response to this political character have concentrated on Plato’s Republic and Laws, the works which made understanding of Islam and Judaism as perfect law for the political order possible. Strauss here turns to the esoteric character of the Islamic philosophers as a bridge to a summary of “Fârâbî’s Plato” in ten paragraphs, while selectively quoting the content of his essay with some small changes: of about fifteen thousand words of “Fârâbî’s Plato,” Strauss reuses a tenth, which is about one-fourth of the whole introduction. After this summary, Strauss returns to the tension between philosophy and society in Islam and Judaism, as distinguished from Christianity. It turns out that the situation of philosophy is more precarious in Judaism than in Islam. In fact Islam is a kind of mean between Christian harmony of philosophy and religion and the radical conflict of Judaism and philosophy. Regardless of this small detail, Islamic and Jewish philosophy both suffered from and also reaped the benefits of their precarious condition. Plato’s success in averting the direct conflict between society and philosophy should not blind us to its fundamental character. It is the task of the sociology of philosophy to understand this conflict.

In this same introduction, Strauss suggests that the reader should consider the “precise meaning of ‘repetition’” by referring to his essay on Maimonides.⁵³ In “Fârâbî’s Plato,” he explains this in a rather clear statement:

As we might have learned from Maimonides, “repetition” is a normal pedagogic device which is destined to reveal the truth to those who are able to understand by themselves while hiding it from the vulgar: whereas the vulgar are blinded by the features, common to the first statement and the “repetition”, those who are able to understand will pay the utmost attention to the differences, however apparently negligible, between the two statements and in particular to the “addition”, made in the “repetition”, to the first statement. ( 23)

We should therefore look at some of repetitions in Strauss’s introduction and consider changes, additions, and subtractions. Through these repetitions, Strauss points toward the most important and essential points of his forgotten writing. What are these essential points? When reproducing the discussion of Plato’s turn from the way of Socrates and his new approach towards politics, Strauss makes four changes: First, the fundamentally theoretical character of Platonic philosophy disappears from the repetition. Second, Plato’s “insight into the nature of beings” which “mitigated” Plato’s “moral fervor” and led to his critique of Socratic moralism is not reproduced and is subtracted from the repetition. This absence is, however, somehow remedied by the inclusion of a short discussion of “rational laws” in the seventh paragraph, the subject of the chapter on Judah Halevi.⁵⁴ Third, “literary productions of ‘the philosophers’” ( 23) is now replaced by “the activity of the falāsifa.” Fourth, the consequence of “the gradual replacement of the accepted opinions,” which in “Fârâbî’s Plato” is described as the “destruction of the accepted opinions,” is dropped in the repetition. Gone also is Strauss’s observation that Alfarabi’s silence about Plato’s doctrine of immortality means that Alfarabi considered that part of Plato’s philosophy “an exoteric doctrine.” What remains is that Alfarabi “silently rejects Plato’s doctrine of a life after death.” This is Strauss’s way of pointing us to the principal historiographical claim of “Fârâbî’s Plato” in 21, the idea of Plato as a nonhistorical work. In other words, Strauss guides the careful reader towards the central importance of that paragraph which might seem to have been entirely forgotten in the repetition. This point should be considered side by side with the disappearance of one of Strauss’s two personal statements in “Fârâbî’s Plato” ( 19: “I do not know whether there ever was a ‘philosopher’ whose mind was so confused as to consist of two hermetically sealed compartments: Fârâbî was a man of a different stamp.”) This prepares the ground for turning to Strauss’s next and last essay on Alfarabi. The essay which is one of the most difficult studies he ever wrote.

¹In this chapter, all numbers identified by in parentheses refer to the paragraph numbers of Leo Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg: Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Saul Lieberman, Alexander Marx, Shalom Spiegel, and Solomon Zeitlin (New York: The American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), 357–93. “Fârâbî’s Plato” was “written in the period from November 12, 1943, to March 29, 1944.” Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 46n38.

²Strauss, “Eine vermißte Schrift Farâbîs,” 90–106 (GS II:167–76); Strauss, “A Lost Writing of Farâbî’s (1936)”; Leo Strauss, “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws,” in Mélanges Louis Massignon, vol. III (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1957), 319–44; Strauss, “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws,” 1959.

³Alfarabi, De Platonis philosophia. This does not, of course, decrease the importance of Strauss’s claim. See Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 5; Harvey, “Leo Strauss’s Developing Interest in Alfarabi,” 70–71.

⁴In this regard its fate rather resembles that of Strauss, “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon.” After Strauss’s death, “Fârâbî’s Plato” was included in a collection of contributions to the annual Proceedings and various Jubilee volumes published by the American Academy for Jewish Research. This republication reproduces the old edition of “Fârâbî’s Plato” without any changes or revisions. See Arthur Hyman, ed., Essays in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1977), 391–427.

⁵Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 5.

⁶This is not contradicted but rather confirmed by two other partial discussions of this work: these two discussions by Christopher Colmo are both reactions to Strauss’s essay and under the influence of his monograph. See Christopher Colmo, “Theory and Practice: Alfarabi’s Plato Revisited,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 4 (1992): 966–76; Christopher Colmo, Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), chapter 5. See also Christopher Colmo, “Reason and Revelation in the Thought of Leo Strauss,” Interpretation 18, no. 1 (1990): 145–60; Steven J. Lenzner, “Strauss’s Farabi, Scholarly Prejudice, and Philosophic Politics,” Perspectives on Political Science 28, no. 4 (January 1, 1999): 194–202.

⁷For a recent historical discussion see Coleman Connelly, “New Evidence for the Source of Al-Fārābī’s Philosophy of Plato,” in A New Work by Apuleius: The Lost Third Book of the De Platone, ed. Justin Stover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 183–97.

⁸In the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss twice reminds us, in a rather comical fashion, that falāsifa and falsafa are the Arabic transcription of the Greek words for “philosophers” and “philosophy.” See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 10n4, 12n8. Such an explanation is absent in “Fârâbî’s Plato,” and the Arabic term does not appear, which probably points towards the “unhistorical” project pursued in “Fârâbî’s Plato.” This also makes the changes subsequently made significant. The addition of those two rather unnecessary footnotes brings the total of the introduction’s footnotes to twenty. For the contextual reasoning behind Strauss’s introductory statement on the relationship between Maimonides and Alfarabi see Harvey, “Leo Strauss’s Developing Interest in Alfarabi,” 73.

⁹Strauss also mentions two other methods available to Alfarabi for harmonizing Aristotelianism and Platonism: The second method is to prove that “the esoteric teaching of both philosophers are identical.” The third method consists of showing that “the aim” of both Plato and Aristotle is the same. For Strauss, this third method is followed by Alfarabi in The Philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle, a tripartite work whose second part is dedicated to the philosophy of Plato. Strauss does not say anything about the second method. He explains, however, in the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing that, according to Alfarabi, Plato and Aristotle “have given us philosophy” as well as “the ways toward it and the way toward its introduction after it has been blurred or destroyed.” According to Strauss, this agreement seems much more fundamental than any difference of doctrines. Furthermore, this concern with the revival of philosophy after its demise seems to be one of the reasons for Strauss’s interest in Alfarabi in general, the founder of political philosophy in Islamic civilization. See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 12.

¹⁰See also 33: “Fârâbî’s only mention of spiritual things occurs in a summary of popular opinions, or at any rate of opinions of men other than Plato.”

¹¹For this question see Alfarabi, Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Muhsin Mahdi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3–6; Alfarabi, The Political Writings: “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 119–24; Galston, “A Re-Examination of al-Farabi’s Neoplatonism”; Marwan Rashed, “On the Authorship of the Treatise On the Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages Attributed to Al-Fārābī,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 19 (2009): 43–82. For more on this debate see Harvey, “Leo Strauss’s Developing Interest in Alfarabi,” 80–82.

¹²Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 5.

¹³Fauzi Najjar, in his edition, synthesizes these two titles by calling it “Al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya also known as The Treatise on the Principles of Being.” Alfarabi, Kitāb Al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya, al-Mulaqqab Bi-Mabādi al-Mawjūdāt, ed. Fauzi Najjar (Beirut: al-Maṭba̒a al-Kāthūlīkiyya, 1964).

¹⁴For the English translations, see the following editions: “The Political Governments” = Alfarabi, “Political Regime,” in The Political Writings: Volume II Political Regime and Summary of Plato’s Laws, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 27–97; “The Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City” = Alfarabi, On the Perfect State, trans. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); “The Virtuous Religious Community” = Alfarabi, “Book of Religion,” in The Political Writings: “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 85–115.

¹⁵See Alfarabi, “Political Regime,” 72 (Najjar 83); Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, 100 (Gauthier 13–14).

¹⁶See Chapter 1 of this volume. For a discussion of heresy in Islamic philosophy which concentrates on more outspoken figures see Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rāwandī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī and Their Impact on Islamic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

¹⁷See the discussion of this subject in the Introduction of this volume.

¹⁸This is Kalman P. Bland’s translation of a passage from Averroes’s Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Intellect (surviving only in Hebrew). Strauss refers to this passage in footnote 39. The German translation in Steinschneider’s book referred to by Strauss is the following: “Diess hat Abu Nazar in seinem Commentar zur Nicomachia [Nicomachica] bewogen, anzunehmen, dass der Mensch keine andere Vollkommenheit, als die durch die speculativen Wissenschaften zu erreichende habe, und er bemerkt: die Ansicht, der Mensch werde ein separates Wesen, ist eitles Geschwätz, denn das Werdende [und] Vergehende wird kein Ewiges.” See Averroes, The Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect by Ibn Rushd with the Commentary of Moses Narboni, ed. Kalman P. Bland (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982), 85; Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 70–73.

¹⁹Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 125–26, 126n98; Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” 369.

²⁰Leo Strauss, “On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 47; David Leibowitz, The Ironic Defense of Socrates: Plato’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 132.

²¹In four cases mentioned by Strauss, two are clearly related to Plato (15, 12, and 15, 13), one is clearly that of other people (14, 16), and one is not easy to identify (15, 6), but as it is preceded by “He [i.e. Plato] mentioned that,” one can safely say it is Plato’s view. This might explain why Strauss sounds less than certain about this point.

²²The same point is made by a reference to Lessing. See footnote 97 of “Fârâbî’s Plato.”

²³Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 15n10.

²⁴In this connection, see a curious report appearing in the commentary by Asclepius on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “a certain Panaetius is said to have had the audacity to deny the authenticity of the Phaedo because he denied the immortality of the soul and wanted to make of Plato a partner of this denial.” František Novotný, The Posthumous Life of Plato, trans. Jana Fábryová (Prague: Academia Prague, 1977), 54. I owe this information to Peter Ahrensdorf.

²⁵Strauss, “Notes on Philosophy and Revelation,” 178; Leo Strauss and Karl Löwith, “Correspondence between Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1988): 190 (Letter to Karl Löwith on July 17, 1935, GS III.657); Strauss, “Exoteric Teaching”; Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 462; Marc Buhot de Launay, “Leo Strauss et la découverte du classicisme ésotérique chez Lessing,” Les Études philosophiques 65, no. 2 (2003): 245–59.

²⁶G. E. Lessing, “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment,” in Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 43.

²⁷Catherine Wilson, “The Reception of Leibniz in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 460. Cf. Lloyd Strickland, “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 326.

²⁸Lessing, “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment,” 46.

²⁹Lessing, “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment,” 52.

³⁰Lessing, “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment,” 54.

³¹Lessing, “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment,” 48. This passage is quoted in Leo Strauss, “How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952), 182.

³²Leo Strauss, “Introduction,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952), 17.

³³Averroes, Tahafut Al-Tahafut, 359–62 (Bouygues 581–84). For Strauss’s view of the salutary effects of religious beliefs see Leo Strauss, “Notes on Lucretius,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 100, 105, 127, 131; Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 10–11, 29–30, 47–49 (GS I:21, 50–51, 76–79). For the difficulty which Averroes’s unusual method of defending philosophers’ belief in the immortality of the soul creates for traditional scholarship see Leaman, Averroes and His Philosophy, 94–96.

³⁴Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 107n33.

³⁵For a detailed discussion of Strauss’s rhetorical strategy in Thoughts on Machiavelli see Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 23–115.

³⁶For the rhetorical character of Strauss’s presentation of Judah Halevi and the question of the unbelief of the philosophers cf. Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 109 with Laurence Lampert, “Exotericism Embraced: ‘The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,’” in The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 46.

³⁷Lenzner, “Strauss’s Farabi, Scholarly Prejudice, and Philosophic Politics,” 199ff. For an example of Strauss’s radicalism on this subject in his private correspondence see Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 3, 706 and 707 (Letter to Gershom Scholem on December 7, 1933).

³⁸Cf. “For may one not expound, as a commentator, or as a historian, with the greatest care and without a muttering of dissent such views as he rejects as a man? May Fârâbî not have been attracted as a pupil of philosophers by what he abhorred as a believer? I do not know whether there ever was a ‘philosopher’ whose mind was so confused as to consist of two hermetically sealed compartments: Fârâbî was a man of a different stamp. But let us assume that his mind was of the type conveniently attributed to the Latin Averroists” ( 19) with “Yet could not Farabi, as a commentator, have expounded, without a muttering of dissent, such views as he rejected as a man? Could he not have been attracted, as a student of philosophy, by what he abhorred as a believer? Could his mind not have been of the type that is attributed to the Latin Averroists?” Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 14. See also 34 and its disappearance in the Introduction of Persecution and the Art of Writing. For a detailed discussion of the rhetorical aspect of Strauss’s depiction of the conflict between Reason and Revelation see Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 3–29.

³⁹Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 104–5, 105n29; Strauss, “Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 43.

⁴⁰Philosophy “designates primarily, not a set of dogmas, and in particular the dogmas of the Aristotelians, but a method, or an attitude.” Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 105n29.

⁴¹“[Philosophy] is radically atheistic. The difference between Plato and a materialist like Democritus fades into insignificance if compared with the difference between Plato and any doctrine based on religious experience.” Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 146.

⁴²Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 40.

⁴³Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, 4–5; Strauss, On Tyranny, 196–97.

⁴⁴This is done through a clear and, from the historiographical point of view, problematic abstraction from some of Alfarabi’s positive doctrines. See Colmo, “Theory and Practice,” 973ff.

⁴⁵Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 148.

⁴⁶See footnote 5.

⁴⁷2 × in 9, 1 × 11, 1 × in 16, 3 × in 22, 1 × in 23, 1 × in footnote 32. Strauss once mentions “Fârâbî’s Platonism” ( 5).

⁴⁸In this regard Alfarabi is less outspoken than Averroes, who directly rejected Plato’s doctrine of immortality, thus proving himself to be more than a “mere commentator” (footnote 43). See the discussion of this issue in Chapter 1 of this volume.

⁴⁹“But let us return to the point where we left off” ( 22). This indicates that the whole preceding discussion, at least from 19 or perhaps from 13, is a digression.

⁵⁰This response partly predicts and partly reacts to the hypothesis advances by some scholars who have been unsuccessfully searching after Alfarabi’s predecessors. Strauss’s specific interlocutors seem to be Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer. See Richard Walzer, “Arabic Transmission of Greek Thought to Medieval Europe,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 29 (1945): 172; Alfarabi, On the Perfect State, trans. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 9; Rosenthal, “On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World.” See also Rosenthal, “The Place of Politics in the Philosophy of Al-Farabi,” 158; Muhsin Mahdi, “Al-Fārābī’s Imperfect State,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 4 (1990): 691–726; Ralph Lerner, “Beating the Neoplatonic Bushes,” Journal of Religion 67, no. 4 (1987): 510–17.

⁵¹See Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 131n115; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 16 (aphor. 10).

⁵²Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 87n112.

⁵³Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 16n12.

⁵⁴Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 10–11.