|
Ideas whose time has come: A Conversation with Iranian
philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo
Logos
Issue 5.2, Spring-Summer 2006
By Danny Postel
| Ramin Jahanbegloo was released from prison
in August 2006, after a four month
detention.
handsoffiran.org |
Ramin Jahanbegloo, one of Iran’s preeminent intellectual figures, is currently
behind bars in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where he has been held in
solitary confinement since April 27th, 2006, with no formal charges brought
against him. Among the hundreds of scholars across the globe who have signed an
Open Letter to Iran’s president demanding Ramin’s immediate release are
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Zygmunt Bauman, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Noam Chomsky, J.M.
Coetzee, Juan Cole, Shirin Ebadi, Umberto Eco, Jürgen Habermas, Leszek
Kolakowski, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Martha Nussbaum, Orhan Pamuk,
Charles Taylor, Tzvetan Todorov, Immanuel Wallerstein, Cornel West, Howard Zinn,
and Slavoj Žižek.
Head of the
Department of Contemporary Studies at the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran,
Jahanbegloo’s 20 plus books include, in English, Conversations with Isaiah
Berlin (1991), the edited collection Iran—Between Tradition and Modernity
(2004), and the just-published Talking India: Conversations with Ashis Nandy
(2006); in French, a study of Gandhi’s political thought, an essay on the
philosophy of nonviolence, a book of interviews with George Steiner and one with
the Iranian philosopher Daryush Shayegan; and, in Persian, studies of
Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Clausewitz, and Tagore, and works on
tolerance and difference, democracy and modernity, and the dynamics of Iranian
intellectual life.
Ramin
received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Sorbonne, was a fellow at the Center
for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, taught political philosophy at the
University of Toronto, and is the Rajni Kothari Professor of Democracy at the
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. He is one of the founders
of the journal Goft-o-gu (Dialogue) in Tehran and worked on the magazine Esprit
in Paris. In recent years Ramin has brought an endless stream of Indian,
European and North American intellectuals to lecture in Iran — among them Fred
Dallmayr, Timothy Garton Ash, Agnes Heller, Michael Ignatieff, Adam Michnik,
Antonio Negri, Richard Rorty, and the late Paul Ricoeur — effectively acting as
a kind of philosophical ambassador between Iran and the outside world.
The following
interview was conducted via e-mail in January and February of 2006. It will
appear in Danny Postel’s Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, forthcoming from
Prickly Paradigm Press.
For more on Ramin’s fate, see
www.macleans.ca/ramin. For a selection of his writings, see
www.iranproject.info/articles/articles.asp.
Danny Postel:
You’ve talked about a “renaissance of liberalism” taking place in Iran. Can you
talk about this “renaissance”? Where does liberalism stand in Iranian
intellectual and political life today?
Ramin
Jahanbegloo: Sartre starts his essay “The Republic of
Silence” in a very provocative manner, saying, “We were never more free than
under the German occupation.” By this Sartre understands that each gesture had
the weight of a commitment during the Vichy period in France. I always repeat
this phrase in relation to Iran. It sounds very paradoxical, but ‘We have never
been more free than under the Islamic Republic’. By this I mean that the day
Iran is democratic, Iranian intellectuals will put less effort into struggling
for the idea of democracy and for liberal values. In Iran today, the rise of
hedonist and consumerist individualism, spurred by the pace of urbanization and
instrumental modernization after the 1979 Revolution, was not accompanied by a
wave of liberal measures. In the early days of the Revolution liberals were
attacked by Islamic as well as leftist groups as dangerous enemies and betrayers
of the Revolution. The American hostage crisis sounded the death knell for the
project of liberalism in Iran.
But in recent
years, with the empowerment of Iranian civil society and the rise of a new
generation of post-revolutionary intellectuals, liberal ideas have found a new
vibrant life among many intellectuals and students. The ideas and sensibilities
that comprise contemporary Iranian liberalism were more or less formulated by
intellectuals such as Muhammad Ali Furughi a century ago. Furughi’s writings and
translations of that period were mainly discussions of the basic norms of
constitutionality and pillars of modern thought. For example, in a text called
Huquq-e Asasi Ya’ni Adab-e Mashrutiyat , published in Tehran in 1907, he
wrote:
The government has two powers: first, the making of laws, and second, the
execution of laws. If the powers of legislation and execution remain in the
hands of a single person or a single group, the conduct of government will
result in despotism…. Therefore, government is constitutional only when it has
separated these two powers from each other and invested them in two separate
groups.
The idea of
separation of powers is one of the key concepts of Iranian liberalism today. For
all those who support the idea of a referendum on and reform of the Iranian
Constitution, the concept of “separation of powers,” and not just “separation of
factions” (as we have today in Iran), is essential.
But there is more to this, because Iranian liberalism is perceived by its
supporters in Iran today as a more critical project than it was in Furughi’s
time. For the generation of intellectuals and politicians in the 1920s and 1930s
like Furughi, Taghizadeh, Jamalzadeh and others, liberalism was a technique of
progress, something to be activated as a universally executable program,
irrespective of the local contours of culture. They regarded liberalism as a
system of protocols that, when enacted by policy-makers, ensured the creation of
institutions that enshrined the rule of law, and generated a rationally
organized and governed public life. But the species of liberalism which has
taken hold in Iran today, though it is complementary with the traditional wave
of liberalism in Iran, is distinctive and decidedly original.
Thanks to the recent discovery and translations of the schools of liberal
thought dominant in the Anglo-American world, as found in the works of Isaiah
Berlin, John Rawls and Karl Popper, and an appreciation of older traditions of
liberalism (Kantian, Millian or Lockean), a new trend of liberalism has taken
shape among the younger generation of Iranian intellectuals. Iranian liberals
today do not deny that the liberties appropriate to a liberal society can be
derived from a theory or stated in a system of principles, but their view of a
liberal society is related to a view of humanity and truth as inherently
unfinished, incomplete, and self-transforming. The principles of Iranian
liberalism cannot be grounded in religious truth, because the very idea of free
agency, as it is understood today by Iranian liberals, goes against any form of
determinism (religious or historical).
In a country
like Iran, where the logic of the theological-political is still absolute and
where there is a single master-value, the principle goal of liberals is to fight
for the idea of value-incommensurability that affirms a pluralism of ethical
values and different modes of being. This is to say, the chief task of Iranian
liberalism is to establish the proper balance between critical rationality and
political decency. The lack of liberalism, symbolized by the rise of
unreasonable and violent radicalism in the Iranian Revolution (both on the Left
and the Right), committed a huge injury to our commonsense ways of political
thought and political action, and led to deep confusion about questions of moral
responsibility and collective human solidarity based on individual
self-creation.
In more concrete terms, against the revolutionary model of citizenship a new
model of citizenship is suggested by Iranian liberals who work as human rights
activists, NGO organizers, intellectuals and students — a model defined in terms
of the empowerment of Iranian civil society, the expansion of human solidarity,
privately pursued projects of self-creation, moral education of the public and
the development of the vocabulary of liberal democracy. The insistence of
Iranian liberals on the concept of “civil society” as a space which stands in
necessary opposition to the state is a check on the arbitrary and authoritarian
tendencies in Iranian society. The creation of many voluntary associations,
independent journals and reviews, and social and cultural NGOs as a genuinely
participatory arena of civic engagement, deliberation, discussion and dialogue
has played a crucial role in the promotion of civil society in Iran. As such
Iranian civil society remains an important site of dissent and a battleground
for Iranian liberals who try to bridge the gap between the formal structures of
democratic governance and the cultural, social and economic conditions for the
realization of democracy in Iran.
DP: The work of Jürgen Habermas is quite popular in Iran today. Can you
talk about his visit to Tehran in 2002 and the effect it has had on the Iranian
intellectual scene? Why do you think his ideas have caught on with Iranian
students and intellectuals in the way they have?
RJ:
Habermas’s visit to Iran was a huge success. He was treated in Iran the way
Bollywood actors are treated in India. Wherever he went or lectured, he was
encircled by hundreds of young students and curious observers. This same
phenomenon happened again when Richard Rorty visited Iran in 2004: around 1,500
souls came to his lecture on “Democracy and Non-Foundationalism” at the House of
Artists in Tehran. Habermas’s visit to Iran was an important event in the
process of democratic thinking and dialogue among cultures. As Victor Hugo says
in Histoire d’un Crime: “One can resist the invasion of an army, but one
cannot resist the invasion of ideas whose time has come.” The time of
philosophical ideas have come in Iran. Today in Iran philosophy represents a
window on Western culture, on an open society and on the idea of democracy. This
is the reason why Habermas, Rorty, Ricoeur, Berlin and many others are relevant
in Iran. Most of the intellectuals in Iran today are struggling against
different forms of fundamentalism, fanaticism and orthodoxy. Habermas is
considered the inheritor of the Frankfurt School’s intellectual tradition that
from the very beginning questioned all orthodoxies and authoritarianisms.
Actually,
Habermas is the extension of a tradition represented by figures such as Adorno,
Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm and Benjamin who are all very well known in Iran.
Today in Iran, those who are interested in Critical Theory focus a great deal on
the works of these thinkers and there is a network of readers of the Frankfurt
School who are also engaged with Haberms’s work. Of course, Habermas’s work is
difficult to understand and it takes years of ongoing study to catch the nuances
in both his theoretical and political writings. But the difficulty does not stop
Iranian scholars and intellectuals from reading Habermas and translating his
work.
I think there is
also another reason why Habermas is so popular in Iran. It has mainly to do with
the fact that with the failure of Marxist-Leninist movements in Iran and a new
interest in Marx and Hegel, a younger generation of intellectuals and scholars
are interested in rediscovering these thinkers from a new angle. The popularity
of Habermas has also to do with the fact that he sees himself as a nexus in
which Marxist thought is reformed, transformed, refined, improved, and brought
forth to a new generation. Habermas’s theory of communicative action derives
largely from Marx but involves a systematic rethinking of Marx’s ideas. Last,
but not least, I think that Habermas’s positive assessment of the Enlightenment
and his insistence on its democratic potential finds its true place in the
lively debate between the two concepts of tradition and modernity in
contemporary Iran. What interests many Iranian intellectuals in Habermas’s
philosophy is his notion of “theoretical enlightenment” and the possibility of
translating it into practical enlightenment. Habermas’s advocacy of what he
calls post-metaphysical thinking is of a great relevance to Iranian
intellectuals today.
I think Habermas
sheds new light on the problem of democratic agency through a new reading of
Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Weber. I teach Hegel in Iran and I have made great use of
Habermas’s work in my Hegel scholarship. I think Habermas’s reading of Hegel
reinforces his approach to the philosophy of history, but it also consolidates
his defense of the Enlightenment project as modernity’s self-understanding. This
goes hand in hand with Habermas’s reading of Kant which is based on Kant’s
essential insight that there is no fundamental gulf between thought and reality,
that thought and reality are intertwined in a primordial relation. Habermas’s
discourse theory appropriates the Hegelian theme of “recognition” and takes it a
step further. Mutual recognition, understood as the mutual recognition of each
other as free individuals, is a minimal condition in the Hegelian as well as in
the Habermasian theme of recognition. Habermas transforms the original theme of
the Hegelian master-slave dialectic into a communication-theoretical theme of
recognition. I think that Habermas’s Kantian view cannot be maintained without
his explicit endorsement of Hegel’s concept of “Sittlichkeit” and his dialectic
of society and freedom, even though Habermas categorically rejects an objective
teleology.
This brings me
to Kant and Habermas. As you might know, Kant is a very popular philosopher in
Iran and there were several celebrations in Tehran for the 200th
anniversary of his death in 2004. Well, once again as for Hegel, Habermas’s
recasting of the Kantian principle of autonomy and its political implications
shows how public reason lies at the heart of democratizing processes and is
decisive to the survival of non-authoritarian political, social, and economic
institutions in our world. And you can see how Kant — and Habermas’s reading of
Kant — can be helpful in reformulating and re-elaborating a new democratic
thinking in Iran. Habermas via Kant offers Iranian intellectuals and civil
society activists a model of democratic agency and political thinking that
avoids two unattractive alternatives: that of rooting politics in personal
preferences for authoritarian personalities and that of eliminating the
universality of ethics in the name of a revolutionary break.
DP: Hannah Arendt is also quite popular in Iran today. What can you tell
us about this?
RJ: Arendt’s work is well known in the Iranian intellectual sphere. Her
ideas have been not only closely studied but acutely felt by many Iranian
scholars. Three years ago I organized a series of ten nights on contemporary
thought and the first lecture considered the life and work of Arendt. Arendt’s
work speaks in a vital way with new perspectives and new political and
philosophical needs that have emerged among the younger generation of Iranian
scholars and researchers. In a young and troubled Iran in search of a new
intellectual culture, there is a serious desire to explore Arendt’s oeuvre. If
Arendt’s contribution to political thinking finds an important place in Iranian
civil society and among Iranian intellectuals, it is mainly because her thinking
shows us how to recover the meaning of the public world. I believe that Arendt’s
popularity in Iran after the Revolution of 1979 is due to the fact that many
among us saw a similarity between our experience of living with political
violence and totalitarian ideologies (whether Islamist or Marxist-Leninist) and
her own alienating political experience as a Jewish refugee who was excluded
from participating in public life.
This is the main
reason why the first translation of Arendt published in Iran was The Origins
of Totalitarianism. Many Iranians had no idea in 1979 what a totalitarian
state was, because most of us were in no way affected by the experience of
Nazism or Communism. Actually for a long time the Iranian Left dismissed the
claim that Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were a form of
totalitarianism. This reminds me of what Arendt formulates beautifully in her
book. She says that “While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and
cynically emptying the world of the only thing that makes sense, they impose
upon it at the same time a kind of super sense which the ideologies actually
always meant when they pretended to have found the key to history or the
solution to the riddles of the universe.”
I think Arendt’s
work on totalitarianism is key to showing us that evil is an important problem
in everyday politics and that it has the possibility to emerge at any time and
in any place. I believe that many have experienced in Iran what Arendt describes
in the Origins of Totalitarianism as “the anti-political
principle.” It is the end of ethics in the political realm and the unlimited
degradation of civic morality. In 1979 the abyss between men of civility and men
of brutal deeds was filled in Iran with the ideologization of the public sphere.
One saw the breakdown of the old system, followed by the failure of political
liberalism and the formation of the ideologies of 1979. One can say that when
common sense breaks down or becomes impossible, hopelessness and resignation set
in; people lose the capacity for action and despair over their ability to
influence things.
If the Iranian
revolution of 1979 showed us that “anything is possible,” Arendt on the contrary
helped us to understand that thinking is an ongoing process which reclaims our
capacity for action. I believe that Arendt’s phenomenological reconstruction of
the nature of political existence appealed to many of us as a way to uncover the
originary character of political experience that has for the most part been
forgotten in Iranian politics. Reading Arendt in Tehran reminds us continuously
of the fact that freedom is “the ability to begin,” and therefore civil society
is a domain where people, in their collective plurality, remember who they are.
Another
important fact that I think many of us have learned from reading Arendt is that
pure action is free from everything because it is for the sake of the future. It
is the eruption of freedom everywhere and in every situation without a political
affiliation. Freedom is interruption and also beginning anew. Therefore, freedom
is possible even in a world of secret police and of the rule of autocrats.
Freedom is a universal human possibility. The space of public freedom is in
essence finite, but the light of life that shines on the public realm can always
begin something new. In a country like Iran, where you have a vibrant civil
society, the most unlikely things happen on the margins of politics. What
enables men and women, young and old, in Iranian civil society to bear life’s
burdens is the permanent challenge of keeping the free deed alive.
The point is
that the taste for freedom and the experience of freedom can derive only from
the diverse forms of participation in common concerns and community-engendering
values spelled out in terms of a network of independent associations and
institutions. Arendt discusses this in On Revolution, which was also very
popular in Iran. If I am not mistaken in my reading of Arendt, I would say that
her idea of “revolution” poses a big challenge to all those who continue to
believe that revolution belongs to the realm of necessity in our world. The
tragedy of modern revolutions, according to Arendt, is that what is actually
revolutionary is the failed attempt to establish a political space of public
freedom. This reminds me of what Malraux says in his novel L’espoir: “the
revolution came to play the role which once was played by eternal life; it saves
those who make it.” Well, I think that Arendt shows us very clearly that at the
end this salvation in its purest form descends into restoration or tyranny,
because all revolutions are simple hiatuses between liberation and the
constitution of liberty.
DP: Why,
in your view, are Iranian intellectuals and students generally not attracted to
Marxist thinkers and ideas? Why do you think they tend not to be engaged by
political currents like the anti-globalization movement or anti-imperialism?
RJ: It is not necessary to explore very far to find the reason for
this lack of attraction to Marxism in Iran today. In Iran the number of
“Marxists” was always a hundred times greater than the number of people who had
actually read and studied Marx. This is the main reason why Iranian Marxism had
so much trouble making sense of the Iranian Revolution. The Tudeh Party (Iranian
Communist Party) and the leftist groups in Iran have no explanation today of
their political and ideological struggles against liberal and democratic ideas
in Iran. Most of these Marxist groups supported the anti-democratic measures
taken against women and against Iranian liberals. Most of them, not to say all
of them, supported the hostage-taking at the American embassy in Tehran. Some of
them even backed the hard-line clerics in the elections and contributed to the
Jacobinization and Bolshevization of the Islamic Republic.
Now, I ask you the question: what do you think is left of the Left in Iran?
Nothing! Some live in exile around the world. Some are doing business in Iran.
Some have become collaborators. A few are good scholars who teach in American
and Canadian universities. Many lost their lives and will never be back among
us. I salute their courage, even if I think that they were totally wrong in what
they did. Those Iranian Marxist-Leninists who continue to follow their
traditional line of thinking have become more of an anthropological curiosity,
because they continue to hide behind their mystifying appearances, whether
political or other. These people continue to regard their point of view, after
all their political and intellectual failures, as a privileged theory, because
they believe that it represents the point of view of the proletariat and the
proletariat is the class which realizes the passage to the true history of
humanity.
There are two problems here: first, no vision of history, even if it represents
the view of “the last class of history” that can bring an end to all action and
discussion on and in history. Second, there is really no organized proletariat
in Iran and the action and self-awareness of the working class in 1979 did not
take shape in the direction of a socialist revolution; on the contrary, it was
clearly in favor of the Islamic revolution. Actually, the equation was quite
simple for the Iranian proletariat in 1979: “They [the Islamists] believed that
there is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet; while the Communists
believed that there is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.”
The heyday of
the Marxist intellectuals in Iran was over as soon as the Islamic nomenclature
was firmly entrenched in power. Despite the great extent of its influence,
Iranian Marxism did not succeed in the realm of great intellectual achievements.
Marxism’s
intellectual failure in Iran today can best be illustrated by the new attitude
that one finds among the younger generation of Iranian intellectuals. The
methodological position of the new generation of Iranian intellectuals is
characterized by two main philosophical attitudes: the extension of anti-utopian
thinking on the one hand, and the urge for a non-imitative dialogical exchange
with the modern West on the other. To my mind, this problem of achieving modern
conditions for rational criticism is in direct opposition with the tradition of
Iranian Marxism. First, because new thinking in Iran rejects any pre-given
consensus as a foundation, whether traditional authority or a modern ideology.
Second, because it calls for an institutionalization of the public debate in the
form of rational argumentation. Therefore, the real dividing line which runs
between the younger generation of Iranian intellectuals and the previous ones
represented especially by the Left is between the preachers of grand narratives
and monistic utopias on the one hand and the admirers of dialogue and value
pluralism on the other. The point is that the new Iranian intellectual is no
longer entitled to play the role of a prophet or a hero. He/she is in the
Iranian public space to demystify ideological fanaticisms and not to preach
them. Today in a society like Iran where there is a systemic deliberation
deficit, the sentimental leftist view of the intellectual as a vanguard(ian) of
Marxist ideology is inadequate to the new Iranian reality.
In short, what
all this means is that the new Iranian intellectual has finally returned to
earth, to the here and now, after decades of ideological temptations looking for
salvation in eschatological constructions. In other words, Marxism is no longer
considered as a valid or sufficient theory for the explanation of social and
political reality in Iran. In fact, it is precisely the new social and cultural
situation in Iran that has occasioned the younger generation to reconsider the
method and the philosophical validity of Marxism in Iran. The re-examination of
Marxism that is taking place does not occur in a void. Many have arrived at the
point where they feel the need to choose between the ossified Marxism of
the past and the project of radical change of Iranian society. We can call this
process of re-examination a “pragmatic reaction” to the failure of what many
considered to be “progressive” on the grounds that it would solve society’s
ills. In fact, not only were the ills not solved, but Iranian Marxism became an
ill itself. I am reminded of what John Kenneth Galbraith once said about Milton
Friedman: “Milton’s misfortune is that his policies have been tried.” Well, the
misfortune of Iranian Marxism is that it has been tried. And it failed.
Concerning anti-globalization movements in Iran, as you know, like
elsewhere, anti-capitalism has turned into anti-globalization among the
left-wing groups. Most of the anti-globalization groups in Iran are those who
mourn the downfall of the Soviet Union as a countervailing superpower, but you
also find the critics of globalization among the Islamic groups close to the
government. This has to do with the fact that the main source of
anti-globalization sentiment is the resentment toward US military and economic
hegemony. There is also a third group of young intellectuals who seem to be very
much influenced by the works of Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Badiou and
Žižek. The heavy influence of these
authors on some Iranian students takes often nihilistic overtones that you can
find expressed in articles in Iranian journals. On the other hand, you can find
some democratic universalists and cosmopolitan intellectuals in Iran, like
myself, who do believe that since globalization will not fully ensure the
advancement of positive social agendas, we need to empower civil society in the
domestic sphere, as it represents a countervailing power and prospects for
better governance.
DP:
You referred to Marxism’s intellectual influence in Iran.
What exactly has been the extent of that influence?
RJ:
I think it is as necessary to understand why Marxism
succeeded in influencing Iranian intellectual life as it is to understand why in
the end it lost out in the 1979 revolution. There can be no doubt that Marxism
and the Marxist movement registered spectacular successes in Iran despite not
finally succeeding. There is also no doubt that Marxism has received a
devastating political and ideological setback in Iran as elsewhere. Iran never
had a working class comparable to the European proletariat of Marx’s time.
Marxism was propagated in Iran by the upper middle class and rich families, who
were politically against the Pahlavi regime and intellectually the most prepared
to embrace new ideas and to implement them in the Iranian social sphere. From
the 1930s until the end of the 1960s Marxism was the doctrine that provided the
Iranian elite with an intellectual grounding for a rupture with Islamic
traditions. Despite this vibrant interest in Marxist ideas — which in the 1970s
turned into a cult for guerilla warfare, Latin American style — very few Iranian
Marxists had read Marx or were versed in the philosophical literature of western
Marxism, such as the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Korsch, Lukacs, and so on. These
were too complicated and, in any event, little known. If you looked at the
books, pamphlets and political tracts of the Iranian Marxist groups inside and
outside Iran, you would be horrified by the low level of philosophical knowledge
and by the Stalinist tone and content of the writings. Strangely enough, Marxism
was able to find a significant place in the hearts and minds of many Iranian
intellectuals for more than four decades.
It’s interesting
to note that the influence of Marxism and the activities of the Marxist
political groups in Iran fluctuated in direct proportion to changes in the
Iranian nationalist movement and the influence of American diplomacy in the
region. The political and philosophical failures of the Iranian nationalist
movement headed by Mohammad Mossadegh after the coup d’etat of 1953 helped put
wind in the sails of Iranian Marxism, which presented itself as the vanguard
philosophy of the revolution. Also, events such as the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War were influential factors in
the spreading of Marxism among students and intellectuals in Iran. Lenin, Stalin
and Mao were far more influential than Marx in shaping the consciousness and
work of those in the Iranian Communist movement. Most of the members of the
Iranian Communist Party considered (and some continue to this day to consider)
Stalin as a great hero.
Most important
of all was the lack of sufficient awareness among most Iranian Communists about
the force of religion and the strong social networking of the Islamist groups in
Iran. What the Iranian Communists lacked was an appreciation of Islam as an
important social-historical factor in the formation and consolidation of the
Iranian masses. Iranian Marxists, despite their ambition to be close to the
masses, never spoke the language of common people; they were hopelessly out of
tune with the traditions and idioms of the people. This got in the way of their
progress as a revolutionary force, but not necessarily as intellectuals. They
ended up after the 1979 revolution as unhappy intellectuals with no political
party. This reminds me of Brecht’s line: “Unhappy the nation that needs heroes.”
Maybe I could add in the context of what has been said: “Tragic the movement
that cannot have the heroes it needs”!
DP:
You mentioned the urge in Iran for what you call a
“non-imitative dialogical exchange” with the modern West. This brought to mind a
passage from an essay by our mutual friend Fred Dallmayr, in which he observes
that there are often “more vibrant resonances” of European thought in a place
like Iran than in Europe today. “This does not mean,” he writes,
that European perspectives are simply disseminated across the
world without reciprocity or reciprocal learning. Nor does it mean that local
origins are simply erased in favor of a bland universalism … What it does mean
is that landscapes and localities undergo symbolic metamorphoses, and that
experiences once localized at a given place increasingly find echoes or
resonance chambers among distant societies and peoples.” (Small Wonder:
Global Power and its Discontents, p. 115)
Is this the sort
of thing you have in mind when you talk about a “non-imitative dialogical
exchange”?
RJ: I am happy to see that you quote Fred Dallmayr in relation to my idea
of “non-imitative dialogical exchange.” Fred is a colleague and a friend with
whom I have had many fruitful exchanges. We share a deep interest in Gandhi and
India. I agree with Fred’s view of a global or cosmopolitan discourse conducted
along non-hegemonic lines. His idea of an alternative model of cosmopolitan
interaction, inspired in part by Oakeshott’s linkage of conversation with
inter-human friendship has been very helpful for my own formulation of the idea
of “democratic universalism.” As you might know, in my debate with Richard Rorty
during his visit to Iran, I suggested a distinction between two concepts of
“universalism”: a “soft” universalism and a “hard” universalism. “Soft”
universalism provides us with a theoretical framework for various possible
versions of moral life without being founded in a fixed idea of the self. In
other words, “soft” universalism or what we can call “democratic universalism”
provides a universalistic criterion by which we can scrutinize the principles of
action that we might seek as basic to our lives, activities and institutions.
Soft universalism does not force us to choose, but offers us reasons and
arguments for adapting principles which we would adapt. In other words, soft
universalism applies the universal right to reciprocity in a world of plural
values in order to allow people with different values to accept one another.
Unlike “soft” universalism, “hard” universalism is in search of uniformity and
homogenization, because it does not accept the principle of cultural pluralism.
For many the
paradox of the human rights corpus is that it seeks to foster diversity and
difference, but does so only under the rubric of Western democracy. In other
words, it says that diversity is good so long as it is exercised within the
Western paradigm of liberalism. As a result, the center of the debate turns
around the argument over whether or not Western democracy should be considered
as a universal principle. Today in our world, Western democracy is challenged by
religious fundamentalists and by nihilistic groups on the ground that it
represents a form of political imperialism or hegemony. Well, I believe that
even if democracy is not as easily spread or as deeply rooted as many American
thinkers and politicians have assumed, there is no shadow of doubt that each
democratic process is a potential ally in the struggle against the challenges of
our century such as ethnic and religious conflicts, terrorism, poverty and
environmental degradation. This is why I think that the idea of “democratic
universalism” could be the best way of having a non-hegemonic implementation of
human rights in countries where individual freedom is not the most fairly
distributed thing.
This goes hand
in hand with the idea of a “non-imitative dialogical exchange” through which I
suggest an intellectual discourse for redefining communities and
individual-community relationships in a pluralistic way. I also refer here to
Todorov’s concept of “transculturation,” which is very different from
“acculturation.” Transculturation is entering and
living in another culture without necessarily appropriating its mode of being.
Transculturation is the inclusion of new elements in an existing culture. It is
the ability to grasp other traditions and to incorporate them into one’s own
system of thought.
Dealing with modernity in a dialogical way is having the right to speak back to
it. And this response becomes in effect a part of the process of
modernity itself. Therefore, a dialogical engagement is an open-ended process
where the meaning is not located outside the subject but it is situated in the
intersubjective relation of the two cultural subjects who are in dialogue
together. In the model that I am outlining the subjects of the dialogue add to
each other’s identity in and through the dialogical exchange. A dialogical
exchange among cultures is the only way in which our ignorance of other cultures
and civilizations can be aired, our biases challenged, and our knowledge
expanded. A dialogical exchange is the only way to negotiate different
interpretations of the world without imposing one interpretation on others. So
we are talking here about an exchange between two conscious partners
based on a respectful confrontation of their experiences and the knowledge of
the process.
So, there is no
imitation in a dialogical communicative interaction between two cultural agents.
I think countries like Iran, Turkey and Egypt deserve to be analyzed as
societies which have imitated modernity for a long period of time instead of
having a critical exchange with it. The result of this uncritical exchange with
modernity has been the total subjection to different modes of instrumental
rationality with no emphasis on the critical driving force of modernity which
are, in Kantian terms, “escape from tutelage” and “public use of reason.”
Modernity is fundamentally about the reflexive making of history, and in this
process the struggle for mutual recognition occupies the most important place.
This struggle for mutual recognition arises from a dialogical exchange, because
it is a mutual desire of respect. So it is accompanied with a demand that a
person be culturally esteemed for his/her own sake. Of course, it is important
to refer here once again to the concept of democratic universalism, which holds
that there is an underlying human unity which entitles all individuals to basic
rights regardless of their cultures. I will put forth the view that neither hard
universalism nor cultural relativism is sufficient in coping with the increasing
variety of human ontologies. That is to say, we have to look for a universalism
which is founded on all human experiences of history rather than only on Western
values. This is only possible through large-scale cultural encounters. Taking
into consideration the ontological impact of these encounters, an outsider’s
judgment and discussion of local violations of human rights cannot be criticized
as unwarranted ideological interference.
DP:
You mentioned a number of contemporary European thinkers in whom there is
interest among some young Iranians today: Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Badiou,
Žižek. Does Antonio Negri also belong in this group? I know that you brought him
to lecture in Iran last year — which I found interesting, given your views on
Marxism. Writing about Negri’s reception in Iran, Nina Power, who was there,
commented that his ideas were generally regarded as “oddly tangential to
[Iran’s] most pressing concerns.” Negri’s “concept of radicalism,” she noted,
appeared to possess “no frontal relation to the constraints of the existing
order” in Iran. If anything, she observed, Negri’s message appealed more to the
religious hard right. “If there is to be a new Iranian revolution from below,”
she concluded, “it is unlikely to take the form of a plebeian carnival or
quasi-Biblical ‘exodus’.” This sounds entirely consonant with your own thoughts
on the failure of Marxism in Iran. Isn’t it?
RJ:
I know Negri from the time I was living in Paris. We are now
close friends and I have been reading his writings with great interest,
especially his work on Spinoza. I think there is nothing strange in appreciating
Isaiah Berlin and Negri at the same time. This maybe has to do with the fact
that I consider myself a politically moderate and nonviolent person, but a
philosophically radical-minded person. I think philosophy is not only having a
true sense of reality (as Hegel says: “Philosophy is its own time raised to the
level of thought”) but also knowing how to resist it. Philosophy is the daily
practice of dissent at the level of thought. Being a true radical is having the
courage to think and to judge independently.
As I told you
before, what sounded fake to me in Iranian Marxism was that it was supposed to
be a revolutionary philosophy and yet it produced ultra-conservative elements in
Iranian society, who knew how to grow a Stalin moustache or put on a Che Guevara
beret, but had retrograde ideas on social issues like women’s rights or
children’s education. You can see the best example of this in the political
attitude of the Marxist-Leninist groups in Iran regarding the first
demonstration of women against the Islamic regime. Therefore, to make my point I
would add that being a radical today has nothing to do with slogans, but has to
do with the process of thinking differently. On this matter, Negri reminds me
very much of Cornelius Castoriadis, whom I knew very well during my years in
France. They both represent a generation of men of character and integrity who
speak truth to power. I think despite the fact that many continue to consider
Negri as somebody who, according to the former Italian President Francesco
Cossiga, “poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Italy’s youth,” Negri is
a radical mind that we need in the context of today’s world. I think Negri and
Hardt’s Empire was wrongly characterized by many as a mystical and
romantic invocation of a decentered postmodernist and post-imperialist world.
Unfortunately, most people missed the important point of the book which is the
discussion of the biopolitical context of empire. According to Negri and Hardt,
the production of capital converges ever more with the production and
reproduction of social life itself and it becomes ever more difficult to
maintain distinctions among material labor and what they call immaterial labor.
Those who are familiar with the works of the French philosopher Deleuze know
that theoretically speaking Hardt and Negri situate themselves in the line of
Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. One might not agree with the
conclusions of Hardt and Negri’s book, but one can say that Empire is a
work of visionary intensity.
Maybe this is
the main reason I invited Negri to Iran. His presence and his lectures had a
great impact. For those of us who live and work in Iran, every visit of a
prominent intellectual figure is a breath of fresh air which gives us the oxygen
necessary to continue thinking differently. In Iran today, “intellectualism” is
an accusation often concomitant with that of “being pro-Western,” a deviation
from the official line. Therefore, inviting intellectuals like Negri, Rorty,
Habermas, Heller and Ricoeur is a way of crossing borderlines without leaving
the country. It is a way of bringing into Iran the voices of other cultures so
as to further cross-cultural dialogue.
DP:
You mentioned your debate with Richard Rorty. What was the
debate about?
RJ: The first time I met Richard Rorty was during my visit at Stanford.
I was giving a lecture there and took the opportunity to meet with him. At the
end of our meeting I asked him if he would be interested in visiting Iran and
giving a few lectures. He kindly accepted and I organized his trip for June
2004. I thought it would be more interesting to have a debate with him rather
than just having him lecture. So I asked Daryush Shayegan, an Iranian
philosopher, and George McLean, Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of
America, who was invited by another Iranian institution, to join us on a panel.
More than 1,500 people attended this event at the House of Artists in Tehran.
Shayegan’s presentation was mainly based on the idea that secular democracy now
seems inevitable in the Islamic world, given the widespread rejection of
revolutionary ideology and the diffusion of sentiment in favor of human rights.
McLean’s remarks were to do with democracy and inter-faith dialogue. Rorty’s
intervention was based on his idea of “post-democracy.”
According to
Rorty the golden age of bourgeois liberal democracy is now coming to an end. It
lasted two hundred years, and it was good while it lasted, but we can no longer
afford it. People are nowadays being easily persuaded to surrender their
freedoms in the interests of “homeland security.” As you know, Rorty dismisses
the traditional aspirations of political philosophy. Unlike thinkers such as
Locke, Kant, and the early Rawls, who sought philosophical principles which
could provide the theoretical groundwork for a liberal-democratic political
order, Rorty insists that liberal democracy can get along without philosophical
presuppositions and that democracies are now in a position to throw away the
ladders used to construct them. In his speech, Rorty came back to his idea that
an attempt to ground democracy is futile because it is couched in an obsolete
and naïve philosophical paradigm. In line with his anti-foundationalism, he
argued that there is no way to reconcile universal and particular
epistemological justifications. He directed our attention to the manner in which
an anti-foundationalist position can yield ethical claims. Anticipating charges
of cultural relativism, Rorty came back to his ideas on “human rights culture”
and maintained that the claim that human rights are morally superior does not
have to be backed by positing universal human attributes. I then presented my
reply in an effort to elaborate the idea of a democratic universalism.
Considering
Rorty’s argument that the degree to which a “human rights culture” is likely to
be persuasive depends directly on the degree of humility with which it is
presented, I tried to show that Rorty’s light regard for the political and lack
of interest in the institutional conditions for realizing ethical ideals could
present problems on the issue of human rights in the exchange between cultures.
My point is that for many people in non-Western countries, the human rights
corpus as a philosophy that seeks the diffusion of democracy and its primary
urgency around the globe can, ironically, be seen as favorable to political and
cultural homogenization and hostile to difference and diversity. As a result of
this point of view, you can find many Iranian or Indian intellectuals who see
universalism as the product of European history and challenge it as a form of
political imperialism or hegemony.
As a non-Western
intellectual who believes firmly in the ideas of democracy and human rights, I
have been tempted through my readings of Rorty and because of my own experience
as a civil society actor to seek a way out of this dilemma by finding a balance
between the values of cultural rootedness and a sense of belonging, on the one
hand, and the idea of shared, cross-cultural, universal values. Uneasy with the
way Rorty seems to put discussion of the political on hold, I suggest in a very
humble manner my distinction between two concepts of universalism. As I
mentioned previously, “soft” universalism, unlike “hard” universalism, does not
force others to choose, but offers them reasons and arguments for adapting
principles which they might adapt. That is, “soft” universalism applies the
universal right to reciprocity in a world of plural values in order to allow
people with different values to accept one another.
I see “soft” universalism as the only hope for promoting democracy in
non-democratic cultures. This relies on conscious cross-cultural learning and
understanding. When cross-cultural learning can enable us to internalize
democratic values, the possibility of moving in and out of any value system is
preserved. In this situation, individual responsibility replaces particular
values as the focus of concern. So we are talking here of universal values
within a global democratic sphere. I think it would be extremely dangerous to
have a dialogical exchange among cultures without a structure of shared
universal values. In other words, I do not believe in international relations
without an international ethics, especially in situations of power, violence and
crisis. But going back to Rorty, I believe that his take on the desirability of
human rights free of claims to their naturalness is an open-ended debate. But it
certainly requires a long process of political and cultural argumentation and
persuasion, one which many non-democratic societies, like ours, cannot afford
for the time being.
DP: Is there interest in Noam Chomsky and Edward Said in Iran today? As
someone who has interviewed Chomsky more than once, do you sense that his
political outlook speaks to the contemporary Iranian situation? When you brought
Fred Dallmayr to Tehran, he lectured on Said. What sort of response did he get
from his Iranian interlocutors? Do the perspectives of Chomsky and Said — so
paradigmatic in Western academia today — resonate in the Iranian context you
have described?
RJ: Both Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are very well known in Iran and
some of their books have been translated into Persian. I have met Chomsky four
times and each time we had an interesting conversation on subjects related to
the Middle East. Reading Chomsky and listening to him has always been very
inspiring to me. As for Edward Said, I met him for the first time in Paris in
1996. I was introduced to him by Pierre Bourdieu and the Seuil publishing house.
We had a long chat and I asked him if I could make a recording of my
conversations with him. He kindly accepted and I later published my conversation
with him in a book in Iran.
Through Said, I
have met many other interesting people who were either his friends and
colleagues at Columbia or were simply his readers and followers. I have invited
some of them to Iran. Among these, Ebrahim Moosa, Eduardo Mendieta, Ashis Nandy
and Fred Dallmayr were invited in two different colloquiums in 2002 and 2005,
the latter a colloquium on Said organized at the Faculty of Social Sciences at
Tehran University. Fred Dallmayr and the other participants presented papers on
different aspects of Said’s life and work and they were all well received by the
Iranian students. My contribution to this seminar was on
“Edward Said’s Conception of the Public Intellectual as Outsider,” which was
published a year later in the Radical Philosophy Review.
The colloquium on Said was a premiere and it created a new wave of interest in
him and his writings. Many of his later writings are now getting translated. It
would not be an exaggeration to say that for Iranian intellectuals in particular
and the Iranian learned public more broadly, Chomsky and Said are both
considered as towering figures of contemporary intellectual life. This fame is
not only due to their moral courage and intellectual audacity in facing the
challenges of our world, but also because of their deep influence on Middle East
politics. Were Said still alive, he would be amused to know that he was being
read, translated and remembered in a country like Iran. But one must not forget
that Said believed in the universality of ideas even as he understood the
importance of a location for their application. So he would have been against
any misinterpretation or misuse of his ideas and writings by Islamic
fundamentalists.
And this goes
also for Chomsky. In one of my conversations with Chomsky, he makes clear his
belief in the universality of human rights. Of course for Chomsky the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is not perfect and can be improved, but is a
reasonably good expression of principles that people around the world accept.
Chomsky stresses that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put together
from many different cultures that were not Western imperialists. So there is a
real universal aspect to this Declaration. In other words, according to Chomsky,
the principles of human rights are reasonable principles because they express
the consensus that most reasonable people would agree to. So, one can say that
both Chomsky and Said defend a sort of non-hegemonic and democratic
universalism. This is another reason for their status in Iran.
But I should add that Said and Chomsky are not only respected among Iranian
intellectuals because of their radical and anti-conformist attitudes, but mainly
because of their struggle against extremism and authoritarianism. For us, their
struggle is a struggle against embedded prejudices of all kinds and against
institutions (religious and non-religious) which aim to enslave people. I think
that Said and Chomsky are also important to us because their intellectual task
has been a perpetual struggle against the negative role played by the media in
sidelining and covering, if not altogether eliminating “undesirable” news. I
think Said and Chomsky represent good examples of intellectual integrity and
responsibility. Their continuous struggle and hard work is a testimony to the
role of the intellectual in today’s world and the intellectual’s position as an
“outsider” but also as a critical traveler of cultures and traditions in the age
of the global village. Today the struggle of intellectuals in Iran is not only a
quest for pluralism, but also a vital quest for ethical truth and human dignity,
situating the intellectual endeavor in its responsible context. To have a free
spirit and to be an unrelenting force for integrity is not a simple task for
those who are confronted with lies on a daily basis. Few figures have been able
to bring together the radical denunciation of cultural and political hegemony
with such a deeply felt commitment to democratic universalism as Said and
Chomsky. Today reading Said and Chomsky in Tehran is like living life at the
edge. It is risky, but full of excitement and exhilaration. Not only because
they challenge us continuously through their writings but because they ingrain
in us the value of intellectual integrity, which is of the essence in the most
challenging of situations.
DP: You have expressed a deep respect that you and other Iranians feel
for Chomsky and Said in broad terms, as intellectuals. But I want to focus for a
moment on the political content of their ideas. Let me rephrase my
question this way. You’ve painted a picture of a liberal renaissance in Iran
today, of an intellectual landscape in which liberal thinkers and ideas,
generally speaking, hold more sway than do radical/Marxist ones; a milieu in
which the language of democracy, rights, and pluralism has a deeper resonance
than does the language of anti-imperialism, anti-globalization, and
anti-capitalism. Although you’re certainly right to emphasize the universalism
and humanism of both Chomsky and Said, there’s no avoiding the fact that the
central issue around which their political writings revolve is that of
imperialism. Anti-imperialism is not the animating spirit or the central issue
for Iranian liberals, whereas anti-imperialist and Third Worldist motifs formed
the core of the Iranian Marxist paradigm, which — as you pointed out earlier —
was a failed project that the younger generation of Iranian intellectuals
largely rejects. Given this, it would seem to me that Chomsky and Said, as
paradigmatic figures of anti-imperialist thought, would have less direct
political relevance in the context of the Iranian liberalism. Is there not
something of a tension or disjuncture here, between the
liberal-democratic-pluralist project and the radical anti-imperialist one?
RJ: One can be a liberal and be anti-imperialist. As you know, there is
a tradition of anti-imperialist liberals in the West. Classical liberalism was
stridently anti-imperialist. English liberals denounced British empire-building.
By reading J.A. Hobson’s book Imperialism: A Study (first published in
1902) you could find a Fabian line of criticism of the British Empire. The book
is partly a response to the Boer War and it was very influential on Lenin, who
regurgitated Hobson’s ideas with a Marxian twist. Hobson says very correctly
that “Imperialism is a depraved choice of national life, imposed by self-seeking
interests.” The classical liberal sociologist William Graham Sumner was also a
strong anti-imperialist who explained 20th-century US foreign policy
quite clearly when he wrote:
We were told that we needed Hawaii in order to secure California.
What shall we now take in order to secure the Philippines? No wonder that some
expansionists do not want to ‘scuttle out of China.’ We shall need to take
China, Japan, and the East Indies, according to the doctrine, in order to
‘secure’ what we have. Of course this means that, on the doctrine, we must take
the whole earth in order to be safe on any part of it, and the fallacy stands
exposed. If, then, safety and prosperity do not lie in this direction, the place
to look for them is in the other direction: in domestic development, peace,
industry, free trade with everybody, low taxes, industrial power.
So one can talk
about an anti-imperialist liberal tradition in the West, even if it was weak in
its institutional continuity in a country like the United States. If we turn to
contemporary Iranian history, we see clearly someone like Mossadeq, who was
both a liberal and an icon of anti-imperialism in the developing world. By
blocking liberal, secular nationalism in 1953, the Americans unwittingly played
an important role in ensuring the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in that country
a quarter of a century later.
Now to get back to Said and Chomsky and how I think they can be read and
practiced by Iranian liberals, let me quote a line from the American judge
Learned Hand that I have always liked and cited: “The spirit of liberty is the
spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” I think this is the best way of
being a liberal today. There is a difference between this mode of thinking and
neo-liberal thought. To say that reality and truth are the sole properties of
Western liberalism is ideological demagoguery. To me being a liberal means
having more of a moral predicament than a political mandate. So one cannot be a
critical liberal and put imperialism before pluralism. And when I say pluralism,
I mean a non-dominative exchange. This means that by positing a universality of
human experience, we should stand outside the constraints of political and
financial dependencies. So what Said elaborates as “outsiderhood” in his
thinking is an important cornerstone not only to a cross-cultural dialogue, but
also to the situation of critical marginality that an intellectual should have.
I agree fully with Said that being an “outsider” does not mean cultivating one’s
garden, but rather experiencing life as an “unstable cluster of flowing
currents.”
So I situate myself on the side of people like Said and Chomsky, as someone who
stands at a distance from a tradition, in order to be able to develop his
critical capacities in regard to that tradition. This is how one can be a
liberal pluralist and a secular humanist and be at the same time an
anti-imperialist. It has to do not only with creating an alternative narrative
but also resisting the hegemonic narratives that block us from forming and
consolidating this counter-narrative. I think Empire is not merely a political
relationship of power and domination, but revolves around the power to control
the other’s state of mind. Therefore, the job of a critical intellectual is
neither to accept the dominion of another culture, nor to get swallowed by a
nativist politics of identity which ends up with a culturally relativist or
fundamentalist attitude. This also means that fighting for democracy and values
such as pluralism in a country like Iran or Iraq does not necessarily mean
accepting the American way of life. This is a fact that Americans have become
aware of very recently. The truth is that what America has to say about other
people and other cultures is now challenged by those people themselves. I thing
the phenomenon of “American exceptionalism” is in itself a major obstacle to a
just and equal cross-cultural dialogical exchange. Arabs, Turks, Iranians,
Indians and many others are no longer living on the “periphery” of history,
because there is no longer any one center anywhere; we have all become centers.
DP: Although you, Ramin, value and derive insight from the work of both
liberal-pluralist thinkers like Berlin and radical anti-imperialist thinkers
like Said and Chomsky, are Said and Chomsky as popular among Iranians today —
young Iranians in particular — as are Berlin and Habermas?
RJ:
You are absolutely right about Berlin, Popper and Habermas
being more popular in Iran than Said and Chomsky. This is mainly due to the fact
that philosophy has become fashionable among Iranian students. It is surprising
to see the level of interest of Iranian youngsters in philosophy. Even in some
recent Iranian films you can see the main characters reading philosophy books
written by contemporary Iranian or western philosophers. I have personally
organized seminars on Hegel and Kant in Yazd, Isfahan and many other urban areas
of Iran. I am always amazed to see the level of interest of Iranian youth in
philosophy. I think this is because philosophy is experienced as a mode of
resistance against political ideologies and religious dogmatism. Reading
philosophical texts in Iran today is like reading Patocka and Husserl in Prague
in the late 1970s. So no wonder Berlin, Habermas, Rorty, Foucualt, Derrida,
Ricoeur and others are far more popular than Chomsky. What interests Iranian
youth in Chomsky and Said is their critique of American foreign policy in the
Middle East. But as I mentioned earlier, Iranian students have other ideas in
mind. Their discussions turn around concepts like democracy, pluralism, civil
society, tradition and modernity, religious tolerance, and the like.
As for the intellectuals, they are not a monolithic group. In regard to
philosophy and philosophical readings, one can identify three tendencies in
their discourses. The first tendency is secular. Secular intellectuals do not
attempt to promulgate any ideologies or to struggle for the establishment of an
Islamic democracy in Iran (as do the religious reformist intellectuals) and yet
they undermine the main philosophical and intellectual concepts of the
established order. Among them you have post-revolutionary intellectuals, such as
Javad Tabatabai, Babak Ahmadi, Hamid Azodanloo, Moosa Ghaninejad, and Nasser
Fakouhi, who are in their late forties and fifties, and who can be referred to
as the “dialogical intellectuals” (in contrast with the revolutionary
intellectuals of the 1970s and early 1980s). In other words, for the secular
intellectuals, the concept and the practice of dialogue provide an ontological
umbrella for all political and cultural meanings and understandings. The very
objective of this “culture of dialogue” is to move beyond seeing the other as an
“enemy” who must be terminated either as an individual or as a social class, and
to promote a full acknowledgement of the other as a subject. In this case
different intellectual attitudes are asked to co-exist side by side to find an
intersubjective basis for their encounter with modernity and democracy. This
move away from master ideologies is echoed by a distrust of all metaphysically
valorized forms of monist thinking. Unlike the previous generations of leftist
and religious intellectuals, what the critical engagement with modernity has
taught secular intellectuals in Iran is to be at odds with both
fundamentalist politics and with utopian rationalities. The secular
intellectuals are mainly influenced by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Berlin, Hayek,
Popper, Foucault and Ricoeur.
The second and
third tendencies are both based on religious thought, but are divided by
political and epistemological differences. On the one hand, we find the
reformists and on the other hand we find the neo-conservatives. The reformist
group is represented by figures such as Abdolkarim Soroosh, Mohsen Kadivar,
Alavi-Tabar, Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, Mojtahed Shabestari, and many others. The
unifying trait of these intellectuals is their attempt to reconcile Islamic
thought with democracy, civil society and religious pluralism and their
opposition to the absolute supremacy of the Supreme Guide (velayat-e
faqih). The
rise of religious intellectuals can be followed through the writings of Soroosh.
Soroosh’s main idea is that there are perennial unchanging religious truths, but
our understanding of them remains contingent on our knowledge in the fields of
science and philosophy. Unlike Ali Shariati, who turned to Marxism to bring a
historicist perspective to Shiite thought, Soroosh debates the relation between
democracy and religion and discusses the possibility of what he calls “Islamic
democracy.” What Soroosh, who’s now living in England, has been trying to do
during the past decade is convince his fellow citizens that it is possible to be
Muslim and to believe in democracy. Soroosh stresses that there are two views of
religion, a maximalist and a minimalist one. In the maximalist view, according
to him, everything has to be derived from religion, and most of the current
problems in Islam come from this view. But the minimalist view implies that some
values cannot be derived from religion, like respect for human rights. For
Soroosh the maximalist view of religion has to be replaced by a minimalist view,
or else the balance between Islam and democracy is not possible. Thus for
Soroosh a democratic Islamic society would not need any Islamic norms from
above.
Mojtahed Shabestari is among the rare religious intellectuals in Iran who has
challenged the monistic view of Islam. According to Shabestari, the official
Islamic discourse in Iran has created a double crisis. The first crisis is due
to the belief that Islam encompasses a political and economic system offering an
answer relevant to all historical periods; the second crisis is entailed by the
conviction that the government has to apply Islamic law (shariah) as
such. These two ideas have emerged, according to Shabestari, in relation to the
Islamic revolution and the events that followed it. But the fact is, according
to Shabestari, that Islam does not have all the answers to social, economic and
political life at all points in history. Also, there is no single hermeneutics
of Islam as such. Therefore, the relation between religion and ideology is
simply unacceptable and leads to the desacralization of religion. Strangely
enough, the reformist intellectuals have also been influenced by thinkers such
as Kant and Popper (but less by thinkers such as Foucault or Derrida).
Unlike the reformist intellectuals, the neo- conservative intellectuals in Iran
are in favor of the absolute supremacy of the Supreme Guide and against concepts
such as democracy, civil society and pluralism. This movement includes figures
such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Qolam-Ali Haddad Adel, Gholam Reza Awani and Mehdi
Golshani. The famous personality among these is Reza Davari-Ardakani, who an
anti-Western and anti-modern philosopher deeply engaged with the work of Martin
Heidegger. Davari-Ardakani, unlike Soroosh, takes some of the features of
Heidegger’s thought, mainly his critique of modernity, and frames it in Islamic
terms. He rejects the Western model of democracy, which is based on the
separation of politics and religion. President of the Iranian Academy of
Science, Davari-Ardakani could be considered the philosophical spokesman of the
Islamic regime. There is a temptation among the conservative intellectuals to
find an affinity between Heideggerianism and Islamic thought. We thus find no
readings of Said, Popper, or Berlin among this last group. Even those like
Haddad Adel (the president of the Iranian parliament) who are interested in Kant
make no hay of his moral and political writings.
So it is safer
to say that there are varied intellectual currents in Iran and there are
multiple readings of the Western canon. This actually creates an opportunity for
pluralism in the Iranian intellectual arena, which has been absent for many
decades because of the cultural agendas pursued both by the Pahlavi regime and
the Islamic Republic. But it had also to do with the ideological predominance of
the Marxist and Islamic ideas among Iranian intellectuals in the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s. This ideological predominance has posed both philosophical and
practical problems today in Iran.
DP: What, if anything, can liberals outside of Iran do to support Iranian
liberals? There are many who argue that Iran’s issues are internal and that
western “outsiders” should stay out of them (a view shared by both Islamists and
many Marxists, it’s worth noting). When I
interviewed Shirin Ebadi, she firmly rejected this position and
expressed a desire for “human rights defenders…university
professors…international NGOs” to support the struggle for human rights in Iran.
“All defenders of human rights,” she said, “are members of a single family.”
“When we help one another we’re stronger.” As an internationalist and a
universalist, what are your thoughts on this question?
RJ: I fully agree with Shirin Ebadi on this issue. Of course, as you know
this intellectual attitude is not new. It goes back to the 18th
century. I always take pleasure in reading and teaching Thomas Paine, the great
British-born liberal who writes in his pamphlet Common Sense: “Every spot
of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the
globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a
stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive,
and prepare in time an asylum for mind.”
Well, one can say that the violation of freedom and democracy and disrespect of
individual liberties in different parts of the world continue as in Paine’s
time. Since the idea of human rights transcends local legislation and the
citizenship of the individual, the support for human rights can come from anyone
— whether or not she is a citizen of the same country as the individual whose
rights are threatened. A foreigner does not need the permission of a repressive
government to try to help a person whose liberties are being violated. Because
insofar as human rights are seen as rights that any person possesses as a human
being (and not as a citizen of any particular country), the reach of the
corresponding duties can also include any human being, irrespective of his/her
particular citizenship.
So I am a human rights universalist, but I do not think that one can enforce
human rights and liberal values through violence or military force. I am,
however, for humanitarian intervention, as it is practiced by human rights
activists and NGOs around the world. The universality of human rights should not
be turned into a double standard. Human rights provide us with a standard of
conduct which no one can now ignore. Human rights are primary core values of
human civilization. They are far from being perfect, but they are the
cornerstones of our daily struggle for human dignity around the world.
Protecting human dignity is not only about protecting oneself from violence but
also defending the other.
So there should be firm grounds for moral objection when people’s rights are
violated in another society. For me one of the essential problems today is to
promote cross-cultural harmony. For relativists, as Clifford Geertz has argued,
“humans are shaped exclusively by their culture and therefore there exist no
unifying cross-cultural human characteristics.” I think this is to say that
there are no ultimate standards of right and wrong by which to judge cultures.
If this becomes true, we all turn into passive spectators of naked violence
happening in front of our eyes. Of course I don’t think religion can be used to
judge our actions as right or wrong, because religion provides us with a fixed
moral philosophy. But there are ethical standards that transcend political
actions in international relations. I think there should be an equal submission
of all to a minimal set of universal ethical rules. This is how the struggle for
the liberal values of pluralism and negative liberty can join the universal
values of critical cosmopolitanism. It is a route that leads from Kant’s idea of
a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view to Fred Dallmayr’s vision
of “our world.” Values and norms do not remain unaffected by what I regard as
cross-cultural exchange and learning. There is no one way of life suitable to
all individuals around the globe, and reasonable people therefore can and must
have reasonable discussions and arguments about human values as they are
practiced in different cultures. This means that against moral relativism and
hegemonic universalism from above we can build a cosmopolitan democracy from
bellow. In other words, we have to take up the challenge of defending the
classical values of liberalism by promoting the spirit of cosmopolitanism and
tolerance for diversity. After all, cosmopolitanism in essence means opening to
others, accepting differences and living with plurality. But it also means going
beyond one’s own national prides and prejudices and giving allegiance to
humanity.
I’m not talking about a universal culture that situates itself against
particular experiences of local cultures. But it is a middle way between
neo-liberal universalist interventionism and particularist identity positions. I
think liberals around the world can join Kant and say with him that the global
public sphere is the place in which the private interests of members of global
civil society can be reconciled with the universal moral obligations of
membership in a “kingdom of ends,” a kingdom in which individuals and
relationships are treated as ends in themselves, and not simply means to other
ends. That is to say, no one can pretend today in America, Europe or the Middle
East to believe in liberal values and not have a sense of solidarity with
individuals who are fighting for their dignity. We need to think hard about the
meaning of solidarity. Solidarity is not about supporting those who share your
precise view of politics. It’s about supporting those who struggle against
injustice and violence and who fight for democracy. The real hope for democrats
in Iran is that this sense of the word “solidarity” be understood by humanists,
liberals and cosmopolitans around the world.
DP: You have made a most eloquent intellectual case for a cosmopolitan
perspective. But let me ask you on a very practical level: what can we liberal
internationalists and democratic pluralists living outside of Iran do,
concretely speaking, for our Iranian counterparts? How can we be of assistance
to you in your struggle?
RJ: I think the first thing to do is to recognize the fact that there
are democratic pluralists in Iran fighting for democratic values and civil
liberties. Their struggle for the empowerment of Iranian civil society goes
beyond a simple act of contestation. The process of democratization in Iran is a
day-to-day challenge which is not only political, but also social and cultural.
Democracy is not a place where you sit and relax for the rest of your life. It
is about responsible civic participation and intellectual integrity. So without
this sense of responsibility I don’t see how we could manage to have a strong
civil society wherein people find their confidence in speaking and acting.
Pascal used to say that “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have
found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.” This is very true
of our situation in Iran. The actors in Iranian civil society need to find their
own logics and practices of togetherness rather than those imposed on them. But
this cannot be done without intellectual maturity. Maturity is the condition of
possibility for pluralism in Iranian civil society. I am referring here to the
Kantian idea of moral responsibility based on intellectual maturity. As you
know, Kant defines immaturity as one’s inability to use one’s own understanding
without the guidance of another. In other words, the public use of reason is the
true condition of democratic life. Therefore, our aim in Iranian civil society
is to create a horizontal line of critical reasoning in the public sphere.
I sincerely believe that finding a place for philosophical debates in the
Iranian public sphere today is the highest level of political maturity. This is
how our counterparts in the West or the East could be helpful. I have been
trying to invite writers, philosophers and scholars from different parts of the
world here in order to help them understand Iran but also to open up
intellectual discussions with them on subjects that are of great interest to us.
Iranian students are eager to know more about Western cultures and are curious
to discuss their views on religion, democracy, philosophy and culture with
western intellectuals. What they ask for is not sympathy but empathy. They have
an eagerness to learn from others and through this learning to become more
mature. What remains most fundamentally true is that “empathy” as opposed to
“apathy” is the most desirable, even the definitive, philosophical state in our
struggle for political maturity. A civil society like ours which is experiencing
an alternative form of togetherness on a daily basis requires empathy and
solidarity. Empathy is for us the condition of belonging to a global public
sphere.
Consequently, we cannot undergo a process of redefinition of our political self
without having created this situation of empathy with others. It seems clear
that in our philosophical quest for maturity we need to address the question of
empathy in the sense of what Husserl called “experiencing someone else.” This is
where your notion of “solidarity” finds its true meaning. If we understand by
“solidarity” getting involved with another’s community to create change, then
the best form of solidarity with Iranian liberals is to engage in a
comprehensive and empathetic dialogue with them. Liberal ideas are new to a
country like Iran. They are only 100 years old. To internalize them, Iranian
civil society needs to know them better. This cannot be done by violence or by
exporting ideas. We need to have more debates among us. Internationalism,
liberalism, and democracy are powerful concepts and have indeed begun to
dominate all of the debates within Iranian civil society. But we need to examine
them together critically. This is where the concept of maturity links up with
that of solidarity. Solidarity does not mean charity, it does not mean
intervention and it cannot be reduced to altruism. Rather it is something which
grows out of an understanding of common responsibility. It is in our common
responsibility as liberals to help Iranian civil society to grow.
DP: You have said that “[l]iving in Iran is living at the edge and
struggling as an intellectual is like walking on a tightrope.” Can you explain
this?
RJ: The work of an intellectual requires living on the edge. This is the
only way the essence of life can be grasped. This is even truer in a challenging
country like Iran. Do you remember the epigraph to Somerset Maugham’s great
novel The Razor’s Edge, taken from the Upanishads: “The sharp edge of a
razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is
hard.” I suppose what I am trying to say is that you get used to living with
challenges in a society where there is no such thing as a plain and simple life.
Life is not easy when you have to live morally in the face of untruth. Maybe
intellectuals in Iran have learned to face a life of challenges because the
challenge of truth is more crucial to their existence than it is to others. I
believe one cannot be a friend of truth without living on the edge. But to do
that one has to be gripped by the idea and the passion that life and
thought are one. If thinking and aliveness become one for us then
certainly we can reach the conclusion that living a challenging life in Iran is
a meaningful process. For me as an Iranian philosopher, thinking differently is
a form of going beyond the challenges of my daily life in Iran. It’s an opening
up to the world which goes hand in hand with the act of being free. I think this
internal dialogue with oneself — listening to one’s inner voice, as Gandhi used
to say — but also having an acute sense of the world, could be a quest not only
to understand the meaning of our world, but also a ceaseless and restless
activity of questioning on the nature of the evil that one has to confront in
political life.
In Iran we have grown accustomed to living with political evil but to not
thinking about it. I think today more than at any other time our mode of
thinking and our mode of judging in Iranian society have a crucial role in
determining where Iran can go from here. Thinking democracy and establishing
democratic governance in a country like Iran is not an easy task. Unlike what
people think, it is more than a simple political enterprise. The challenge here
is to focus on the process of democratic consciousness-building which can
provide continuity to the political structures of democracy by way of contrast
with our authoritarian traditions. This is where philosophical thinking comes to
our aid as a grammar of resistance to the tyranny of tradition. This does not
mean that I consider the tremendous body of traditions in Iran as mere errors of
the past. It means that our political and social traditions are acceptable as
long as they enable us to think freely. We may find ourselves at home in our
traditions, after all. But we need to distinguish between a false sense of
belonging and respect for a common space where the plurality of voices can be
realized.
I must admit that I am in fullest sympathy with a mode of thinking that would
bring intellectuals into struggle against thoughtlessness and acceptance of
things as they are, and speaking and acting by appeal to authority, to tradition
or to personal loyalty. Here, I believe, lies the deep paradox between living in
and for truth and the commitment to a culture where one can feel at home. Thanks
to western traditions of thought, I learned to think philosophically and
politically, but I have refused systematically, during the past 30 years of my
intellectual life, to abandon the Iranian question as the focal point of my
philosophical and political thinking. An independent and critical thinker in
Iran who takes responsibility for the marginal status thrust upon him is like an
acrobat walking on a tightrope.
Logos 5.2 - spring/summer 2006
© Logosonline 2006
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