In The Book of Letters, Al-Farabi does a more in depth examination of communication and language. He goes all the way from the first signals used to communicate to the formation of language as an art (rhetoric, memorization and recitation, poetry, linguistics, and writing), meticulously cataloguing every advancement in our linguistic ability as human beings. He does this to aid in explaining the point he makes in the first several paragraphs of the book: that philosophy precedes theology and religion and ll thought, as well as how philosophers are the only truly “select” people, and all other special or select people are simply “kings of the masses.”
What does he mean by “select” and in what way does philosophy “precede” religion, theology and jurisprudence? How are practitioners of philosophy more select among academics than those of other disciplines? All these questions are answered by this hardly simple explanation of the beginning of language.
He argued that all other leaders (the select of the masses) achieve their specialness through an eloquent and skillful use of words to express meaning in a more perfect way, whereas philosophy is the meaning they gain prestige by eloquently expressing. Philosophy is the “tool” that is used in all other verbal pursuits. Just as the “perceptibles” mentioned on page 4 are the meaning which all other language perpetually seeks to more perfectly describe. The description of language also shows how far removed Al-Farabi believes philosophy to be from religion and theology. He is not discounting religion as contradictory of philosophy. However, he is saying that religion is a frivolous extrapolation of philosophy for the consumption of the masses.
He also touches several times on the idea of habituation “both moral and artificial.” This is an interesting perspective that explores the same idea of good and bad that is examined in Plato’s Gorgias. However,he addresses it through a very different perspective. He is saying that the natural development of humans is moral. Only the influence of outside forces, which are unnatural to us are a contamination of our naturally developed morality, creating artificial habits. Our moral habits are what we would develop were we simply to follow the course of what is “easiest” or natural physically. However it is difficult to determine if he means to say man is naturally moral, or if he is defining morality as what we are naturally predisposed towards, or what we are without “artificial” influences.
