Continued ... Critique of Abdolkarimi’s Remarks in His Debate with Mehrayeen (Part One) — Page 2

Or consider Foucault’s understanding of the intellectual’s task. In his view, the intellectual’s ideal should not be concern for the future or an attempt to shape it, but rather the diagnosis of the illness of one’s own time and the revelation of what politics and power are trying to conceal.

Returning to the history of thought and expressing the intellectual’s task through the perspectives of some of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western thought does not mean loving Western politics or surrendering oneself before it. It means only loving a struggle to which they have remained committed for centuries, and it is only through this commitment that they have continued to influence the history of political thought in the West and continue this struggle today.

Kierkegaard, Foucault, Camus, Chomsky and dozens like them were never supporters of Western politics. Throughout a historical tradition, they stood for fidelity to truth against power and politics within their own societies, and this resistance continues today.
Re-reading Arendt, Kristeva, Althusser and Rancière does not make people such as Mehrayeen Westernised or detached from the reality of their own society, because those thinkers themselves remained critics of the political structures of their own times throughout their lives.

A further point is that the task of the intellectual, contrary to what the professor appears to believe, is not to accommodate the people’s existing historical consciousness, but to fill the distance between that historical consciousness and a truth that has reached the edge of society’s awareness but that no one has the courage to articulate.

William Garrison, the thinker and determined political campaigner against slavery in the United States, courageously stood against reformists of his own time who believed slavery had to be abolished gradually, while taking account of prevailing conditions, public consciousness and questions of domestic security in American society. In the first editorial of his newspaper, which he called *The Liberator*, Garrison wrote:

Do not ask me at such a time to speak softly or from considerations of expediency. I have risen in sincerity; I will not speak with hesitation. A mother whose child has fallen into the fire does not calmly lift her child from the flames, nor does a person whose spouse has been abducted by thieves rise calmly to save the one they love. Do not speak to me of reforms. What you call reform will replace one demon with a hundred others. No one has the right to steal another human being’s freedom, and I will continue my struggle until the last chain is removed from the feet of the last person whose freedom has been taken. In this struggle I will enter into no negotiation with slaveholders.

My question to Professor Abdolkarimi is this: without the uncompromising commitment to truth shown by thinkers such as Garrison, would politicians ever have confronted the necessity of abolishing slavery? Should he have surrendered to the dominant historical consciousness of his time and to his society’s social underdevelopment, or should he have had the courage to say what perhaps many people already knew but before which they remained silent?

I agree that the task of those whom you call intellectuals is not to provide social leadership for the people. The intellectual’s task is neither to remain confined within the consciousness of their own time and accommodate it, nor to think, like a transhistorical thinker, from a future that has not yet arrived. The intellectual’s task is to live on the edge of the consciousness of their own time.

Mehrayeen says what the people know, but becomes their articulate voice before power so that this awareness can cross the threshold of historical consciousness and become the expressed and reflected self-consciousness of our society. He is simply accompanying these people. This is the first task of an intellectual. Yet there is also something in the method to which you yourself are committed—irrespective of the content, which remains open to criticism—that our intellectuals need to learn: sometimes one must possess the courage to stand not against political power but against the people.

Malesherbes, during the reign of Louis XVI, was imprisoned because of his opposition to censorship and his support for thinkers, and he was the only person willing to defend Louis XVI at trial before an angry public and to stand against the destructive violence of their revolution.
He defended the people against the king, the king against the people, and truth against both. This is the kind of intellectual our society needs today.

End of Part One (1)