What Is Being? Al-Fārābī’s Big Question

Imagine trying to write a science textbook, but you don’t get to use the word “is.” You can’t say “the sky is blue” or “Socrates is a philosopher” or “God is good.” You can’t even say “the sky exists.” How would you talk about anything? You’d probably have to invent some new way of speaking—and that’s basically what happened when ancient Greek philosophy was translated into Arabic.

But here’s the strange thing: the word “is” (or “exists”) seems simple, but nobody can quite agree on what it actually means. When you say “Socrates is pale,” are you saying the same kind of thing as when you say “Socrates is a human”? Are you saying the same kind of thing as when you say “Socrates is”? Philosophers have argued about this for over two thousand years.

One philosopher who thought about this harder than almost anyone was Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, who lived in the 900s in what is now Iraq and Syria. He thought that if we could really understand what “being” means—in all its different senses—we could finally prove that God exists, understand what God is like, and resolve all the religious arguments that were tearing his society apart. That’s a lot to put on one little word. But Fārābī had a plan.

The Trouble with Translation

Fārābī had a problem. He was writing in Arabic, but the philosophy he wanted to revive was written in Greek. And Greek and Arabic do not work the same way.

In Greek, there’s a little word—estin—that does a bunch of jobs. It can be the “is” in “Socrates is pale” (connecting a subject to a description). It can be the “is” in “Socrates is” (just saying that Socrates exists). Ancient Greek philosophers argued about this word for centuries.

When Arabic scholars tried to translate Greek philosophy, they realized that Arabic doesn’t have a perfect equivalent. Arabic does have a word for “is” when you’re making a statement about time (kāna = “was” or “will be”), but it doesn’t have a single word that works for the timeless “is” of philosophy. So the translators did something creative: they took the word mawjūd, which originally meant “found” (as in “I found a lost cat”), and started using it to mean “existent” or “being.”

Fārābī thought this was a disaster in disguise. Here’s why: mawjūd is what grammarians call a “paronymous” word. This means its form suggests that it’s describing something that has something else in it, the way “white” describes something that has whiteness in it. So when you say “Socrates mawjūd” (Socrates exists), the word itself makes it sound like Socrates has some thing called “existence” inside him, the way a white thing has whiteness inside it.

But Fārābī didn’t think existence works that way at all. He thought the Greek word estin was actually not a noun or a verb at all—it was closer to what we’d call a “logical particle,” a kind of glue that connects thoughts together. And by using a noun-like word to translate it, the Arabic translators had accidentally made people think that “existence” is a kind of thing that things can have—like a property or an accident.

This might sound like a nerdy grammar complaint, but Fārābī thought it led to serious mistakes about God.

What Does “Being” Even Mean?

Fārābī spent a lot of time sorting out the different things we mean when we say something “is.” He boiled it down to two main senses.

First, there’s “being as truth.” When you say “unicorns exist,” you might mean something like: the concept you have in your mind (the idea of a unicorn) actually matches something outside your mind. If it doesn’t match, your thought is false. In this sense, “exists” is not really a property of the thing itself—it’s a relation between your thought and the world. (Unfortunately for unicorns, this relation doesn’t hold.)

Second, there’s “being as having a real quiddity outside the soul.” “Quiddity” is a fancy word that just means “whatness”—the answer to the question “what is it?” A thing has a quiddity if there’s something that it is, something that makes it the kind of thing it is, independent of what anyone thinks about it. A horse has a quiddity; so does a human. But does a vacuum have a quiddity? A vacuum is nothing, or at least an absence of something, and absences don’t really have a “whatness” in the same way.

This second sense is the one Fārābī really cared about. He thought that when you ask what something is, if you keep pushing the question—“what makes it that?” and “what makes that what it is?”—you eventually trace a chain of causes. And at the end of that chain, you find something that doesn’t need anything else to explain what it is.

The First Being

Fārābī’s most radical claim is that there is a single Being that is the cause of existence for everything else—and that this Being has no cause of its own. He calls it simply “the First.”

Here’s the logic, simplified: Suppose you have a chain of things where each thing’s existence depends on something else before it. If this chain goes on forever, you never get an explanation of why anything exists at all. If it circles back on itself (A depends on B, B depends on C, C depends on A), that’s also no explanation—you’re just going in circles. So the chain must end somewhere. It must end at something that just is, without depending on anything else for its existence.

But Fārābī thought we could say a lot more about this First Being than just “it exists without a cause.” Because it has no cause, it can’t have any parts—if it had parts, each part would be a kind of cause of the whole. So it must be absolutely simple. It can’t have matter, because matter is a kind of part. It can’t have a form, because form needs matter. It can’t have a definition, because definitions break things down into simpler parts (like “human = rational animal,” where “animal” and “rational” are simpler ideas).

Because it’s simple, there can’t be two such beings. If there were two Firsts, they would have to be different in some way—but if they’re both simple, there’s nothing to make them different. They’d be the same thing.

And because it’s simple and has no matter, Fārābī argues that it must be intelligence—pure thinking—and that what it thinks about is itself. It doesn’t need to think about anything else, because that would mean it depends on something else for its perfection.

The Problem of Making Things

Here’s where things get tricky. If the First Being is perfect and simple and only thinks about itself, how does it create anything else? Doesn’t creating require some kind of action or change?

Fārābī has a strange answer: the First’s existence just is the cause of other things. It doesn’t do anything special to create. The existence of the First is so powerful that it overflows, like light from the sun. From this overflow, one thing emerges: the Second Being. This Second Being is also immaterial and intelligent, but unlike the First, it has two objects of thought: itself and the First. And this double-thinking produces two things: another intelligence (the Third) and the first physical thing (the outermost sphere of the heavens).

This chain continues until you get all the levels of reality: the intelligences that move the planets, the spheres themselves, the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), and finally humans and everything else on Earth. At each level, things get more complex and less perfect.

Fārābī never uses the word “God” in his main work on this subject. He just says “the First.” This might be a deliberate strategy: he wants to argue from pure logic, not from religious authority, to show that philosophy can reach the same conclusions as faith.

Does This Actually Work?

Fārābī’s system is beautiful and ambitious, but later philosophers raised serious questions about it. One big problem: if the First Being is simple and only thinks about itself, how does it know about all the things it supposedly creates? Fārābī seems to say that it knows everything indirectly—by knowing itself as the cause of everything—but this is hard to make precise.

Another problem: if the First’s existence automatically overflows into creation, does that mean the world had to exist? Couldn’t the First have chosen not to create? Fārābī’s answer seems to be no—the world follows necessarily from the First, like a shadow follows a body. This put him in conflict with some religious thinkers who insisted that God freely chose to create the world.

And there’s a deeper worry: if “existence” is not a thing that things have (remember the grammar problem), then what does it mean to say the First is the “cause of existence”? Fārābī’s answer is subtle—he thinks the First is part of what you’d have to mention in a complete definition of anything else. The definition of “human” might include something like “an animal born from parents who…” and eventually trace back to the First. But whether this really works is still debated.

Why This Matters

Fārābī was trying to do something incredibly ambitious: to show that philosophy—not just religious tradition—could tell us about God. He was arguing that by carefully analyzing the concepts we all share (like “being” and “one” and “cause”), we could prove things that matter deeply: that God exists, that God is one, that God is perfect, that everything depends on God.

Whether or not you find his arguments convincing (and philosophers still argue about this), Fārābī’s project reshaped Islamic philosophy, Jewish philosophy, and later Christian philosophy. His analysis of being influenced thinkers for centuries. And his basic question—what do we mean when we say something exists?—is still a live question in philosophy today.

The next time you say something “is,” think about what you’re actually doing. Are you describing the world? Connecting a thought to reality? Saying something about what a thing is made of? Fārābī thought that getting clear on this one small word could change everything.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Being (mawjūd)	The word we use to say something exists or has some property; Fārābī argues it has different meanings in different contexts
Existence (wujūd)	What makes something be “being” in a given sense—usually the thing’s quiddity or cause of its quiddity
Quiddity	The “whatness” of a thing—what it is, independent of what anyone thinks about it
The First	Fārābī’s name for the uncaused cause of everything else—what most people would call God
Paronymy	When a word’s grammatical form suggests something has a property inside it (like “white” suggests “whiteness” is inside the white thing)
Emanation	The idea that the First’s existence automatically overflows or radiates to create other things, without any deliberate action
Circle of causes	The idea that if you trace what makes something what it is, you can’t go on forever or go in circles—you must reach something uncaused

Key People

Al-Fārābī (870–950 CE): A philosopher who lived in Baghdad and then Syria. He tried to revive Greek philosophy in Arabic and show that it could answer the big questions of religion. He was one of the first to write a systematic metaphysics in the Islamic world.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE): The ancient Greek philosopher whose Metaphysics Fārābī was trying to reconstruct and improve. Fārābī thought later philosophers had misunderstood him.
Al-Kindī (801–873 CE): An earlier Islamic philosopher who had a different view of unity and being. Fārābī disagreed with him on whether things other than God can truly be called “one.”
Alexander of Aphrodisias (around 200 CE): A Greek commentator on Aristotle whose ideas about existence influenced Fārābī.

Things to Think About

Fārābī says the First Being thinks only about itself—not about you, or about anything that happens on Earth. Is a being like that worthy of worship? Could you pray to it? What does “God” mean if God doesn’t know or care about individual humans?
If the world follows necessarily from the First Being (like a shadow from a body), was the world forced to exist? Could it have been different? Is this compatible with saying God is free?
Fārābī thought the grammar of the word “existence” was leading people into philosophical mistakes. Can you think of other words whose form might mislead you about what they really mean? (Consider: “nothing,” “time,” “the future”…)

Where This Shows Up

Arguments about God’s existence: When people debate whether the universe needs a creator, they often rely on versions of Fārābī’s argument about chains of causes.
The problem of free will and determinism: Fārābī’s idea that everything follows necessarily from God raises the same issues as modern debates about whether everything is determined by physical laws.
Language and thought: Modern linguistics and philosophy of language still debate whether the structure of language shapes what we can think—which is basically what Fārābī was worried about with the word mawjūd.
Science and religion: Fārābī was trying to show that rational inquiry and religious belief don’t have to conflict. People still argue about this today.