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Phenomenology provides us with a method for critiquing the tools and technologies we use to power our cultures, support our cities, and maintain our state institutions. The environmental crisis that we currently have is inextricably tied to various political crises as well; and how we envision the tools, media, and material structures of our world are tied to these crises. Informed by an Husserlian conception of personhood and consciousness, an anarchic communitarian politics gives us a moral grounding for a critique of liberalism, capitalism, neoliberal democracy, the State, an assumed urban future, and the concept of “sustainability” as it relates to the existential threat of climate change and global warming. Thinking “outside the city” and “outside civilization,” we come to look to the anarchic communitarian leanings of Diogenes and indigenous peoples for a view of a future that does not sustain the status quo but instead radically re-envisions it.Phenomenology provides us with a method for critiquing the tools and technologies we use to power our cultures, support our cities, and maintain our state institutions. The environmental crisis that we currently have is inextricably tied to various political crises as well; and how we envision the tools, media, and material structures of our world are tied to these crises. Informed by an Husserlian conception of personhood and consciousness, an anarchic communitarian politics gives us a moral grounding for a critique of liberalism, capitalism, neoliberal democracy, the State, an assumed urban future, and the concept of “sustainability” as it relates to the existential threat of climate change and global warming. Thinking “outside the city” and “outside civilization,” we come to look to the anarchic communitarian leanings of Diogenes and indigenous peoples for a view of a future that does not sustain the status quo but instead radically re-envisions it.

The fate of al-Fārābī as a political philosopher is currently at stake. In the contemporary scholarship devoted to al-Fārābī, a debate has been waged for several decades between those scholars defending the legacy of Leo Strauss, namely Mushin Mahdi, Miriam Galston, and Charles Butterworth, who view al-Fārābī as a political philosopher par excellence by privileging his political texts as holding the esoteric key to deciphering his philosophy as a whole and scholars such as Dimitri Gutas and David Reisman who rebut Strauss by claiming that one cannot decisively distinguish between his political philosophy and other extant texts in his corpus. Instead of rehearsing their positions here, I wish to offer a new path forward by turning to al-Fārābī’s account of the imagination as a means to investigate the phenomenon of political community. This paper shall argue that al-Fārābī’s exposition of political community is primarily informed by a phenomenological naturalism adopted from Aristotle that is primarily oriented by how the human soul encounters phenomena by engaging with the surrounding world via the faculty of the imagination. In what follows, I shall briefly sketch the role of the imagination in Aristotle’s De Anima and Rhetoric before turning to al-Fārābī’s own phenomenology of the imagination in his political treatises ranging from the Attainment of Happiness (Taḥṣīl al-Sa‘āda) and Selected Aphorisms (Fuṣūl al-Muntaza‘a) to the Political Regime (Kitāb al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya) and the Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City (Mabādi’ Ārā’ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fāḍila).

In his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger points out that Aristotle's natural community is part and parcel of his more general attempt to account for the presencing (ousia) of things in nature (physis). That is, in order for things in nature to be they need to fulfill their definitions. Consequently, for humans, community is the place where humans as life-possessing-logos (zoōn logon ekhon) and at the same time life-in-the-polis (zoōn politikon) can reveal their genuine definition (horismos). This will render possible the first formulation of the community as a natural community. Yet, just like the status of abnormalities and accidents in nature, prioritizing the fulfillment of justice as laws of the society over the singular expression of individuals would eventually complicate the status of justice with regard to the abnormal and unprecedented cases. Derrida’s critique of the laws shed a good light on the limitation of all laws with a universal claim which will be applied here to the Aristotelian formulation of them. Finally, this essay highlights the moments that Aristotle’s admission of the impossibility of universal laws provides the possibility of alternative comportment towards otherness and alternative ethics. In effect, it is Aristotle's mistake or "missing the mark" (hamartia) that opens the door for a new mode of following the laws, I call nomadic following.