Good Weeds? Alfarabi’s Virtuous Subversives

Why would anyone cultivate weeds? Alfarabi’s The Political Regime prompts this unexpected question. There Alfarabi uses a horticultural metaphor inherited from Plato to describe his ideal regime. His imagined polity is a garden beset by weeds, which threaten to choke the life out of the other plants. Although most of these weeds are to be eradicated for the sake of the garden that is his ideal regime, Alfarabi proposes to cultivate one variety. This kind of weed challenges the official doctrines of the regime. Since the regime is based on false teachings about the universe, such debunking questioning poses a series threat. Yet alfarabi proposes to indulge and encourage the doubts of these weeds. In this paper, we explore the reasons for Alfarabi’s strange treatment of these dissidents. We argue that Alfarabi’s proposal reflects an important disagreement with his teacher, Plato, about the extent to which an ideal model ought to be tethered to reality. Our argument helps to illuminate one of the more perplexing aspects of Alfarabi’s political thought and his relationship with Plato. Most broadly, we show that we will miss important contributions to ideal theory if we fail to appreciate that what constitutes “ideal” may vary widely.