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 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