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

There is no doubt that our contemporary intellectuals have played a major role in the modernisation of Iran. Had other social forces placed fewer restrictions in the path of this movement, they might have been even more successful in modernising Iran and extending modernity. Yet there is a profound difference between modernisation and the creation of a civilisation.

From the beginning, the dominant contribution of our intellectual current has therefore often been not philosophy and the production of knowledge, but “translation”, “product-orientation” and “content-orientation”. Within such a paradigm, globalisation is imagined as a complete ready-made package, in all its details, with our intellectual class serving chiefly as its importer and translator.

A major difference between the Western Enlightenment and our own intellectual movement—and perhaps that of many other countries conventionally described as the Third World—is that theirs developed endogenously, while ours arose from a painful comparison between “us” and “them”. We had been asleep for centuries while the world moved forward. Then, especially after the Safavid period and more visibly under the Qajars, we suddenly found ourselves confronting a power and grandeur that made our knees tremble. Thus the earliest advocates of modernity attacked the traditions of their society not necessarily from an internally generated need but from the humiliation produced by this comparison, imagining that if we modernised everything from clothing to the alphabet, this antidote might revive a dead body.

The fact that Iranian intellectual life began partly in self-hatred and disappointment continues to cast a shadow over us. We dislike what we are, and the mission of our intellectuals becomes not the rediscovery of beauty but the daily reminder of ugliness: the construction of an imagined beautiful world in which we Iranians are its ugly faces. Today the intellectual is often less a function than a personality type: negative, exhausted, omniscient, self-centred, demanding, perpetually critical, representative of an aristocracy whose membership requires conformity with a prescribed psychological and personal style.

Theodor Adorno once told intellectuals, in the rendering used here, “Do not allow anyone or any belief to become your representative or substitute.” Yet many contemporary intellectuals look like factory products generated by a system producing exclusive representatives. Gerald Brenan offers, in the formulation presented here, a useful description of this class: people for whom “ideas are more important than values”, with ideas generally applying to themselves and values to others.

From one perspective, perhaps the term “ironist” is more appropriate than intellectual for this class. Richard Rorty’s account of the ironist—developed in a different context but adaptable here—rests on three features: radical doubt about the value of what one already has; refusal to rely on those inherited resources for solving problems; and doubt that what one has provides sufficient power grounded in realism.

Intellectuals are often among the more intelligent classes of society. Yet I also agree with the idea associated with Edward de Bono that many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers, just as the power of a car and the skill of its driver are two different things. If, after centuries of sleep, we want to rise from the bed of our history and stand upright, we must decide once and for all not to become examples of this definition of the intellectual. The vicious circle in which we are trapped will not be repaired unless we value building more than destruction and accept responsibility for our own contribution to thinking within our society.

For years our intellectuals have spoken from above about the shortcomings of the people and society. This time it is our turn to begin criticism with ourselves, and alongside what we demand from society and its people to remember something of our own debt and responsibility to them. Only through such criticism can thinkers emerge whose first concern is to change the individual—the one person in society—rather than to remain transfixed by politics and power, because they know that every person who begins to think shakes the foundations of social stagnation.

Aydin Areta