Iranian intellectual life today and the need to return to philosophy — Part One

In Plato’s enduring Apology, which recounts Socrates’ defence before the Athenian court that sentenced him to death for impiety and corrupting the young, Socrates is presented as telling the people of Athens, in the rendering used here: “A wise person who wishes to fight for justice and truth must avoid becoming absorbed in politics. I have done so; otherwise I would have been destroyed years ago without being of any use either to myself or to you.”

There is no doubt that what Socrates said and tried to teach ultimately carried a political meaning. Otherwise it would not have disturbed those in power enough to make them determined to kill him. But as a thinker he was a man of virtue, not a man of power. What made him enduring was that he lived and died in the effort to transform how the people of his society thought and lived, not because he made politics his principal object. He understood that politics is ultimately the harvest and product of the culture and horizons of thought of a society rather than their creator. How greatly Iran’s intellectual sphere, yesterday and today, needs such an understanding and such thinkers.

The complex and damaging relationship between “politics and intellectual life”, and consequently between “power and intellectual life”, has repeatedly harmed our capacity for independent thought. Across four generations of contemporary Iranian intellectual life—from the Constitutional period to the present, from the first modernist monavvar-al-fekrs, to nationalists, to leftist and revolutionary intellectuals, and then to the movement that calls itself religious intellectualism—the struggle for political power has often been so consuming that political power itself has become an obsessive final aim of intellectual activity.

Thought certainly needs power if it is to establish itself in the social sphere, but political power is not the final aim of thinking. I am not claiming that every intellectual in contemporary Iranian history has been power-seeking. My argument is that politicisation and the pursuit of power have been dominant and destructive tendencies within our intellectual life. One result has been a rupture between philosophy and intellectual activity, reflected even among educated classes in the tendency to place political matters before the work of thinking itself.

This is a fall into a condition in which the political thinker is reduced to the political activist. Unexamined ideals are consumed, and there is a famine of original, insight-producing thought. Yet many brokers stand ready to sell imported or warehoused products in elegant packages labelled Locke, Gramsci or even Shariati—products that promise that by consuming them you too can become an intellectual. This is our “factory for producing intellectuals”: a vicious circle in which thought remains captive beneath the yoke of power and excessive politicisation.

Here one can understand the sentiment attributed to Noam Chomsky when he says that many contemporary intellectuals are servants of power and that he would be ashamed of himself if he did not try to expose them. But obsession with power is not the only injury suffered by our intellectual life. From the beginning, something has been missing from our intellectual movement—something that should form the substance of intellectual life, but does not. The self-bestowed title “intellectual” makes it more difficult for this ugly absence to be seen.

If the pioneers of the European Enlightenment called themselves intellectuals, they were indeed a generation that thought independently, stood on its own feet and built a powerful tradition of thought that was first worked through intellectually and only later, in historical circumstances, became a basis for politics.

They thought freely and became worthy of the title intellectual because of the light they genuinely cast upon their societies. We, who are so ready to take the title for ourselves, should answer a different question: on whose feet are we standing? And what value have we added to what we have taken from others?

Aydin Areta