The Meaning of Life from Farabi's Point of View

In this article we study the meaning of life in the philosophy of Abu Nasr Farabi in English for the first time, in contrast to familiar works discussing his contributions to philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, and political philosophy. We present the findings in relation to contemporary literature in the field of the meaning of life and the divisions made by analytic philosophers. In Farabi’s philosophy, there is a fundamental connection between theism and true happiness (Sa'adat) based on the knowledge of the soul and its immortality. As a philosopher who believes in God and the immortal soul, Farabi designs a system based on which man's worldly life becomes meaningful given the supreme goal of achieving good fortune in the afterlife and in connection with God. We characterize Farabi's approach as a supernaturalist (against naturalist) theory involving both God and a soul (against only one of these) that is based on the discovery (against error theory) of a single meaning in life (against pluralism), built upon objectivism (against subjectivism), action-guiding (against knowledge merely for its own sake), and holist (against partialism).