“So to thine Everpresence, beyond time, 

                    Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star 

                             That bleeds Infinity-”

                                      - Atlantis, Hart Crane

 

              “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. 

                It surrounds us and penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.”

                                       - Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi

 

At the edge of time, far above the stars lies a clockmaker’s library. Its shelves are filled with books as far as the heart can see, each one of them containing the manuscripts for the Forms, the unchanging idyllic paradigms of nature. Some of them trace the genesis and ends of individual souls, others trace the path of nations and cultures, and some the path of the human race across its history. These books share two things in common, first a library which grants them the exclusive status of being denoted as forms of potential perfection, and second, each one of them shines its beaming light onto the observers of their pasts, calling them to actualize these perfections during their time on earth. This library is a representation of what Plato conceives of as the Good, Aristotle as the Prime Mover, and Al-Farabi as The One. In order to gaze upon these falling stars one needs to look with the mind rather than the eyes, given that they exist in a state bereft of time, space and matter, and yet serve to describe objects that are very much bound by these elements. Some things obscure our vision, thus distorting the light of these temperamental pieces of knowledge. Infamously, the Platonic shadows of transient appearances distract us from these forms, and our own shadow stands at the mouth of the cave questioning its worth in the face of such bright lights (508d). Even more corrosively, the mischaracterization of the metaphysical relationship between the observer and the Good, whether this is by confusing the observer for the library or the library for the observer, distances our conclusions from the natural unencumbered Truth (508a-b). Plato looks at the falling stars and notes they are not bound by the spatio-temporality of the material world and concludes that his Kallipolis should bear the same mark if it is to approach the lights as close as possible. Thus he strives for the unification of the polity’s conviction under the mandate of a Philosopher King charged with emulating the Oneness of this library. Aristotle ponders at the same stars and concurs that surely they are distinct from what is temporary and material, but it is exactly because they can be seen by finite beings that their observations are bound by the material nature of our sight. Thus it’s in his defense of the multiplicity of a city that he recognizes our inability to abandon the material world’s tendency for fluidity and change, just as much as we cannot ignore mankind’s plurality and detestation of plateaus. The objective of this paper is to develop the inconsistencies of Plato’s Kallipolis and his metaphysics, display the need to reconcile his political theory with Aristotle’s in order to make the Kallipolis viable, as well as place the two philosophers on the same spectrum of metaphysical thought utilizing the Al-Farabian Triple Hypostasis in order to make their contentions compatible. While by no means will this paper be an exhaustive effort of the harmonization of the two Greek philosophers’ political thoughts, it will serve as a viable starting point.

 

Plato’s Kallipolis aims at developing the institutional political structures necessary to sustain the highest degree of oneness in the city. This oneness aims to unify the convictions of the citizens of the city under the mandate of a Philosopher King that is both aware of and holds a conviction towards the universal and absolute Good. The King would belong to a class of individuals with a supposed predisposition to the contemplation of the Good, granted to them by a noble lie which preserves societal hierarchies. This ruler would represent the leading epistemological, political, and moral source of legitimacy from which other institutions and individuals would derive their claims and convictions. Effectively, Plato’s mission is one of homogenizing the state in an effort to eliminate individuality and the contesting claims of authority over the interpretation of the Good which it instigates. While at first glance this “hostility toward the individual” as Karl Popper (109) denotes it, appears to threaten our most basic instincts for freedom and autonomy, the Good that Plato recognizes holds a bit more sway over the natural proclivities of our souls, and consists of a uniform substance which both Aristotle and Al-Farabi would accede to. The true danger of the Kallipolis lies instead in the subtle implications of an epistemological ceiling interfering with the individual’s capacity to attain the very good that the state’s legitimacy is contingent on. This peculiar good belongs to the class of immaterial ideas that can be “intellected but not seen” (507b), it is metaphysical and isn’t bound by classifications of time and space, as opposed to the thoughts that are bound by the senses and the transience of the material world. I can observe a law that states Muslims must sign up with a government registry under the moniker that it upholds the virtue of justice by preserving the safety of the community. And yet, if a state mandates this as a form of the Good that pertains to justice which would bring the constituency closer to a virtuous state of being, it would misguidingly appear to be so. Aristotle stated that the “people do not acquire and safeguard the virtues by means of external things, but the latter by the former” (1323b1), thus calling on Plato’s identical notion of the good first being introspected. In fact, Plato’s ascension from the cave represents the first condition for the good, becoming aware of it. 

 

This exit of the cave is the introspective action of the individual soul becoming conscious of itself and consequently the walls which enclose and loop the intellect. In order to contemplate the light of the good, Plato necessitates that individuals first find it within their souls, and then direct themselves towards the light they must deem themselves worthy of, rather than the shadows which brood at the edge of our senses. As Duerlinger puts it, for Plato, it is only when we conceive of ourselves as “the ‘inner self’, which is the outer self’s immortal soul” that we may identify our moral “good with a life like that of the gods” (312). The appeal of a Philosopher King according to Plato is that “a city will never be happy otherwise than by having its outlines drawn by the painters who use the divine pattern” (500e). However, in order to become aware of the divine patterns which emanate from the sun, what Plato calls “the offspring of the Good” (508b), the source of true knowledge, the virtues and beauty, we must first find ourselves within. When the Philosopher King’s interpretation of the Good is the only legitimate claim of what is accepted as good, it’s legal and societal mandate onto a populous that is bound by unity trivializes the first condition for the awareness of what is good. The ruler is tasked with rightfully pursuing this immaterial Good, while the rest of the polity is sent on the inconsequential pursuit of the good as a material end, rather than the intellectable metaphysical end that it exists as. Assuming Plato’s safeguards on the technocratic political elite, such as abolishing their private property to curb corruption and elevating their propensity to the virtues through eugenics, work in dissuading the distortion of the perceived Good, would that justify the population’s blind pursuit of the good? Well, it doesn’t have to, so long as we reconcile Plato’s political structures aimed at oneness with Aristotle’s aim to develop the populace’s consciousness of the true Good so that it aims at the same source of virtue as the Philosopher King. 

 

Governments irrespective of their regime form must appease the constituency, otherwise even the most oppressive tyrannies are toppled. In today’s global polity, if they’re not brought down by the enthralled populace, they’re brought down by the international community. Thus, in order for the Philosopher King to maintain his claim of legitimacy, their policies must be guided towards the same Good as the populous otherwise civil disobedience is an inevitability of the Kallipolis. Aristotle states that the city comes “into being for the sake of living, but [remains in] being for the sake of living well” (1252b31). In order for Plato’s state to remain one rather than face dissidence, the notion of ‘living well’ must be the same for the ruler as for the populace. One’s judgment on the legitimacy of the state rests in the determination of whether it fulfills its functions in promoting the well-lived life. The trouble for Aristotle is that the “city is by nature a certain kind of multiplicity” (1261a18) and represents a plurality of individuals with different kinesis, the motion of growth towards their identified good, or towards their ‘well-lived’ lives. If a person “is happy by means of virtue, he will also claim that a city more excellent in virtue is happier” just as those who regard “living well as consisting in wealth...also count a whole city as blessedly happy if it is wealthy” (1324a13-15). The good that the population aims towards, be it virtue or wealth, determines the polity’s expectations from the government, and consequently what they deem just and legitimate or not. While Plato tries to prescribe the Good for the city that functions as one soul, rather than a multiplicity, as purely intended as this conviction might be, it will only represent a legitimate claim of power if the constituency is also capable of ascending to the realization of that same universal Good. If the ruler’s policy flowed from a conviction towards the virtues rather than wealth, but the population was solely geared towards wealth, then the state will either devolve into a tyranny of the good or into the regime of a vehemently capitalist democracy. Plato’s political system strives towards a oneness of the city aimed at the ‘Good’, and it can only gain legitimacy and feasibility of consensual oneness if accompanied by Aristotle’s nicomachean mission of developing the virtues of the pluralistic population so that they too may point towards the ‘Good’. And yet a searing question remains, is this ‘Good’ universally accessible, and more pressingly, how can everyone be aimed at the same notion of ‘Good’?    

 

The Good, The Virtuous and The One 

A useful way to conceive of the Platonic reception to the ‘Good’ is as an epistemological mode of engagement with reality. For Plato, “The good is in the intelligible region with respect to intelligence and what is intellected” (508c). Respect to intelligence is the condition of accepting the finitely virtuous nature of our souls so that we may see with the eye of the soul, the nous, or the Al-Farabian actual intellect. For Al-Farabi, in order for the material intellect, the tool we all possess for the contemplation of ideas to turn potential intelligibles into actual intelligibles, it must engage with the Active Intellect. This Active Intellect is like a dance partner for our minds without which our knowledge lacks the objectivity to realize actual knowledge (al-Fārābī 220–223). The dance partner we choose, however, has a direct consequence on the quality of our knowledge, whether it carries with it the tinge of temporality and subjectivity, or the objectivity of reason attributed to the Platonic forms. What is intellected is what we choose to aim the intellect towards, be it that “which is illuminated by truth, and that which is”, or  “that which is mixed with darkness”, the transient appearances which limit the intellect to doxa, opinions, and supposed ‘facts’ (508d). When we aim the nous towards the light, we engage with an active intellect that is no more our intellect than the light which bounces off our eyes is the eye itself. Plato draws an analogy between the nous’ relationship with this active intellect, with the eye’s relationship to the sun, the source of knowledge and truth. The eye being the most “sunlike of the organs'' receives its power “as a sort of overflow from the sun’s treasury” (508b) and yet must be true to its nature in order to be receptive to undistorted truth. While sight makes the eye aware of the light of the sun, making it an indispensable element of the system, neither sight nor light can be the sun, for without the sun there would be no light to be aware of and to grant sight function outside of peering into the dark of night (508a-b). In the same way, knowledge as a faculty of the eye of the soul, and truth as a messenger which propounds through the light, cannot be the Good, otherwise, this mischaracterization would distort the reality of what we consider to be good. Thus, by clashing the material intellect with something other than itself, we may draw objectivity from the inquiries of the seeking mind. Contrastingly, when we draw on the shadows we engage with the reflection of ourselves that lies at the edge of the abyss thus impairing the reasonableness of our knowledge. It’s the idea and form of the Good that grants truthfulness in the same way that the sun dispenses light, as well as imbues the soul with the power of recognizing the good, just as light actualizes the eye’s potential for sight (509a). 

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So what does that mean for the Kallipolis? Well firstly that the Good is accessible to everyone the same way the sun shines on every soul that directs themselves towards it and isn’t the function of one single knower’s experience. The Philosopher King as an epistemological ceiling funnels the Good through the authority of the state, blurring the conditions for the undistorted Good. Secondly, that the disposition to perceive the Good is one that is inherent to every soul assuming they first find its essence within. The Good is universal, the conviction to realize the potential virtues necessary to become aware of it and strive towards it, is not. Thirdly, that mischaracterizing the nous’ natural relationship with truth or the Good, or that of truth and the Good would distort the perceived knowledge, a mischaracterization which occurs in the assumption of oneness of the state. Aristotle’s virtues are a being’s capacity to best exemplify their natures. For human beings that nature is contemplation through the rational faculty of the soul aimed at Happiness, which is exemplified through the pursuit of divine ends (1098a13-15). Nagel argues that Aristotle pushes us to view the human good as the divine good (255) given that the nous emanates from a divine Prime Mover and aims to emulate divinity as closely as possible. In fact, Plato’s Philosopher King is charged with this exact task by “keeping company with the divine and the orderly [in order to] become orderly and divine, to the extent that is possible for a human being” (500c-d). This Aristotelian Prime Mover is the counterpart of what Plato articulates as the Good to whom “the sun is the offspring” (508d), and the Al-Farabian ‘One’. This instigator of shapeliness of motion in the natural world “moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality” and is responsible for initiating the potentiality of the nous and is the aim of all actuality (1072a25-26). 

 

Al-Farabi’s Triple Hypostasis echo’s Plotinus’s trilogy of the One, the Nous and the World Soul. The nous, what Anaxagoras called the cosmic mind, is the activated intellect that grants the Philosopher King the capacity to observe divine reality, and Aristotle’s virtuous intellect to strive for the perfect actuality of thought of the divine nous, given that it first acknowledges itself to be anchored in a soul of divine nature. The islamic notion of the Ruh is the holy spirit that God has imbued souls with, it is an essential nature that belongs to the Good. According to Islamic theology, before souls are placed in their mortal forms they encounter the One, and in life they are undergoing the active enterprise of returning to the One, or for the nous, returning to its point of intellectual departure. What we recognize as the nous’ point of intellectual departure will be the end it is aimed at. The World Soul is the ocean of souls that functions as the underlying nature of the collective breath of human civilization as it advances forward through history. O’Meara interprets Plotinus’ World Soul as holding the function of being oriented towards the Aristotelian “divine Intellect and the One”, or Plato’s Good, as well as bringing “order and form to matter” (Bonelli 31). The One, just as the clockmaker’s library, lies at the edge of time, that is, at the point where the Prime Mover encounters the soul consequently inscribing it with its divine signature (1072a20-26), as well as at the other edge of time, prospectively orienting the nous towards the potential good it seeks to actualize (508a-b). And yet awareness of Plato’s kosmos noetos or world of forms, or access to Al-Farabi’s ‘Virtuous city’, requires the nous to set itself on something other than the material world. An important note is that while these philosophers reference divinity as being entwined in the essence of the self, intellect and what is intellected, this is not an immediate subscription to religious faith. The arguments made, such as that of the library, revolve around the metaphysical frameworks which underscore a human being’s epistemological engagement with the material and metaphysical world, the intellect, and the state. The leap into religious faith, or the existence of a shrouded clockmaker that tends to the library, doesn’t undermine their lines of reasoning, but rather is a choice that is made when the path of reason has been exhausted. 

 

The nous’ emanation from this prime mover is most evident in Plato’s Phaedo when Socrates and Cebes describe knowledge as recollection. In short, Socrates posits that we can identify stones as being equal in weight based on their alignment with the Form of equality that we hold in our minds. The stones may be imbalanced and thus they themselves don’t espouse the Form of equality. While the stones may be unequal, we cannot conceive of the notion of equality being unequal. In turn, where do we learn of a Form of equality that cannot be other than what it is if the physical world is bound to entertain the duality of states, equality or its absence? Cebes responds that “we must have learned at some time before, which is impossible unless our souls existed somewhere before they entered this human shape” (72e-78b). The nous can conceive of the world of the forms in potentiality because it originates from a prime mover which represents the “indivisible” Oneness which underscores these potential forms, the Good itself (1073a7). That does not however excuse humans from the task of actualizing these potential forms by seeking to remember or learn from the Active Intellect. When Plato’s Socrates is asked to describe the good, he can only approach it by describing the Good in relation to a “child of the good itself” (507a). A child's virtue does not belong to their present self, however, but it exists in relation to their virtuous end and their guidance there. Aristotle’s nature as the being and “coming to be of things that grow” (1014b15), be it the individual soul of a child of the Good and their nous, or a global polity and its world soul experiencing itself through history, their virtuous nature “is already present [but] we still do not assert that they possess their nature if they do not possess their form and shape” (1015a3). 

 

The Prime Mover or things that are One bear that title because they are “without parts and indivisible”, they do not grow and thus remain static movers that “produce movement through infinite time, but nothing finite has infinite power” (1073a7). The city, just as the regime of the Philosopher King for that matter, are inextricably finite. The multiplicity of the city, whether every constituent aims towards the same Good or not, grounds the polity in an unavoidable state of dynamism. With every generational shift, the population grows from its past and holds the choice to aim to its intended future, outgrowing the ideologies that might have previously seemed like a good idea, be it feudalism or capitalism, colonialism or neoimperialism. Eric Havelock charges Plato’s political thought with “the intrusion of the absolute in place of the relative, of the rigid in place of the flexible and fluid, of the final solution in place of the ongoing experiment”(18). And yet the actualization of a world soul beyond its material underbelly, and the awakening of its individual souls to their relative realities rests neatly on the development of institutions such as the Kallipolis which seek to formalize a global oneness of such magnitude. For now, however, Plato’s efforts towards Oneness ignores the incompleteness of human experience, and the World Soul’s inability to reach an ever-receding Good, for no matter how high it may reach, or how close it might feel, the library will forever be out of reach, so long as time is infinite, and our realities ever-expanding.

Bibliography and Citations:

Aristotle, and Richard Hope. Aristotle: Metaphysics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. 

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Aristotle. Aristotle's Politics. Oxford :Clarendon Press, 1905.

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Aristotle., Robert C. Bartlett, and Susan D. Collins. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

 

Bonelli, Gina M. “Farabi’s Virtuous City and the Plotinian World Soul: A New Reading of Farabi’s Mabadi' Ara' Ahl Al-Madina Al-Fadila.” McGill Institute of Islamic Studies Doctorate Program, Aug. 2009.

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Duerlinger, James. “Ethics and the Divine Life in Plato's Philosophy.” The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 13, ser. 2, Sept. 1985, pp. 312–331. 2.

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Havelock, Eric. “Plato's Politics and the American Constitution.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 93, 1990, pp. 1–24.

 

Mabādi’ ārā’ ahl al-madīnah al-fāḍilah (al-Farabi on the Perfect State) [also known as The Virtuous City], R. Walzer (trans.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

 

Nagel, Thomas. "  Aristotle on Eudaimonia". Phronesis 17.3 (1972): 252-259. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852872X00079 Web.

 

Plato. Plato's The Republic. New York :Books, Inc., 1943.

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Plato, and John Burnet. Plato's Phaedo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. 

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Popper, Karl Raimund. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge, 2008.

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