Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

4 4 Interpretation
There is some clarification of the ranking issue in another
writing of Alfarabi’s, the Principles of the Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous
City (Alfarabi 1985). There Alfarabi is explaining how significant even a small
theoretical error can be when applying it to real life. Among several examples
of misunderstood theory is the error that Alfarabi says occurs when citizens
avidly pursue virtue but mistakenly assume that the nature of virtue is determined
by chance or a mere creation of human imagination, which might
therefore be effectively designed as something completely different in another
society by the imaginations of other citizens. They leap from the observation
that truth and virtue can be expressed in a variety of forms (as designed to conform
to the “accidents” of individual societies) to the false conclusion that truth
and virtue can be expressed in any form. Alfarabi’s summation of this error is
as follows:
This view and those of its kind make away with philosophy by
impressing on the minds that impossible things are true, by claiming
that all things can possibly exist in their substances in opposite
existences and in an unlimited number of existences with their substances
and accidents. And they hold nothing at all to be impossible.
(Virtuous City, chap.19)
The premise of unlimited intellectual relativism described
here is identified as error. Thus, Alfarabi offers two seemingly incongruous
pieces of advice: that some ways of life really are better than others and that
definitive comparison among them requires more certainty than is humanly
possible. Without the first premise, we have no incentive to search for a better
life, but the second carefully positions the search under a canopy of caution
that restrains aggressive action we might believe we are justified in taking based
on thinking our truth is the best truth—an ontology of tolerance, in other
words. In Parens’ investigation of religious war, this is especially significant. If
we are unable to determine with certainty that our own religion is better than
another’s religion, then there can be no clear justification for waging war with
the aim of religious conversion.
On the question of jihad, Parens does an excellent job of distinguishing
Alfarabi’s opinion from the aggressive perspectives of most of his
medieval contemporaries. A further distinction is drawn between Alfarabi and
modern thinkers who dispute the validity of offensive jihad by claiming the
focus was meant to be on internal (greater) jihad, the personal war against
one’s own desires. According to Parens’ alternative interpretation, Alfarabi’s
concept of evil challenges both internal and external jihad. Desires per se are