The shining and the hidden: Notes on politics and solitude from the “Greek Prophets” to al-Fārābī

I In the Attainment of Happiness (Taḥṣīl al-Saʿāda), al-Fārābī draws the course of studies leading from physics to metaphysics, psychology, and politics: At this point the inquirer will have sighted another genus of things, different from the metaphysical. It is incumbent on man to investigate what is included in this genus: that is, the things that realize for man his objective through the intellectual principles that are in him, and by which he achieves that perfection that became known in natural science. It will become evident concomitantly that these rational principles are not mere causes by which man attains the perfection for which he is made. Moreover, he will know that these rational principles also supply many things to natural beings other than those supplied by nature. Indeed man arrives at the ultimate perfection (whereby he attains that which renders him truly substantial) only when he labors with these principles towards achieving this perfection. At stake, then, is the order of inquiry concerning human potentiality, and how it may be actualized to the degree of perfection thanks to “rational” or “intellectual principles” belonging “in” the human. Through the process of perfection, completion, and actualization, the human becomes who/what it is to be, becomes itself. In this sense, the human reaches its own “objective,” that is, reaches itself as an objective, the objective that it itself is. Such a development oriented to perfection, that is, the complete activation of potential, is crucially sustained through principles exceeding “those supplied by nature,” for “the natural principles in man and the world are not sufficient.” A human being comes into her own, realizes and actualizes herself, in a development irreducible to causal concatenation and to the mechanicity characteristic of physical or elemental phenomena. With respect to human becoming, nature (at any rate, nature understood as inexorable causality) remains vastly silent, extends no all-encompassing orders. The human phenomenon exceeds natural jurisdiction even as it remains implicated in it: from within nature, the human is not merely the fruit of natural determination. We may notice, already, that being human is neither given nor a gift. It may be given, at the limit, in the sense in which an assignment is: being human is a task. Indeed, it is “incumbent on man” to explore the meaning and confines of being human, the potentiality and limits, the possible configurations of such a mode of life.