Cover story
Photo by Nader Davoodi
Soroush interview:
Travelers on one ship
Part Two
Sadri: I share this experience. I, too, remember the great exuberance
that this work provoked in our minds.
Soroush: True, (laughing) I don't know why; I was approximately
twenty-one-years old when I read this book. It made me feel that all the
conundrums of the world have either yielded their secrets or they will
upon the slightest inquiry. This book was, in a sense, my first introduction
to Western philosophy as well, for until then I had not attempted a systematic
and academic survey of this field. Later I read other works by Mr. Motahhari,
but nothing ever rivaled the pure joy I felt from this first reading.
Also, I studied the works of one of Motahhari's mentors, the late Mr.
Tabatabai, who was completing his magnum opus; Al Mizan, a comprehensive
exegesis of the Koran.
During these years I systematically and exhaustively studied several
interpretations of the Koran, both from the Shiite and Sunni perspectives.
I am still grateful for this experience as most of my interpretive understanding
of the Koran belongs to this period. Although I had no interpretive theory
of my own, I managed to gain a fair knowledge of the interpretive positions
of the Islamic scholars.
What fascinated me most was the details and intricacies of the differences
in interpretation. This is the same point that later on made me reflect
on the mystery of the differences of opinion in the exegesis of religious
texts. I can assert this sensibility constituted one of the bases of my
thesis of contraction and expansion of religious knowledge in which I tried
to answer the question why different interpreters disagree on the meaning
of a given text.
Sadri: I detect an interesting parallel here. The idea of the
meaning of various interpretations of a text occurred to you as you were
studying different exegeses of the Koran. The hermeneutic theory in the
West, too, is traceable to various interpretations of the bible. It looks
like, even before coming into contact with the Western hermeneutics, you
had independently arrived at a parallel position, that is, the question
what causes different interpretations of a sacred text and what are the
conditions for arriving at an authentic interpretation of it.
Soroush: This may very well be the case. I have always been interested
in the nature of exegeses; not only of the Koran but of works of Hafez
and Rumi. These three texts led me to the art of textual interpretation.
What you said is entirely accurate, though.
My first attempts at interpretation concerned the Koran and an important
Sufi text, Mathnavi. Later on, when I combined these insights with
my knowledge of the philosophy of science and philosophy of history, I
arrived at a relatively comprehensive hermeneutic theory.
To tell you the truth, up to the time that I composed the thesis of
contraction and expansion, I had not studied the hermeneutical theories
of scholars such as Hans Gadamer. Indeed, I was struck by the affinity
of my positions and those of Mr. Gadamer.
Historians, too, disagree on the interpretation of one historical event.
So they grapple with similar issues: Why are there different interpretations
of history? Is it possible to write an "ultimate" history of
an event? And so on. If we combine these questions and those of textural
hermeneutics we would arrive at the intent of my thesis of contraction
and expansion that proposes the fundamental openness of a text or an event
to a multitude of interpretations and a plurality of readings.
The second great thinker whose ideas impressed me was the late Mehdi
Bazargan. I knew him as a politician and a modern scientist with intense
religious interests, but I had scant knowledge of his writings until I
studied them as a university student. I remember that Bazargan's book entitled
The Infinity of the Infinitely Small. lt had such an attraction
for me that as a chemistry teacher I gave away many copies of it to my
best students.
The rise of the late Dr. Shariati and his blockbuster lectures at the
Hoseinieh e Ershad coincided with my graduation from the University of
Tehran and my conscription for two years of military service. During this
time I tried to attend as many of Shariati's lectures as possible. This
continued until the Hosseinieh was shut down by the government.
After my military service I served in the southern town of Boushehr
for a period of fifteen months as a supervisor in a laboratory for food
and drug products. Then I returned to Tehran and engaged in pharmaceutical
research for a few months while preparing to leave for England for postgraduate
work.
As I have mentioned in the introduction to one of my books, I took four
books along on this trip. Molla Sadra's Asfar Arba'eh, Feiz Kashani's
Mahajatol Beiza', Hafez's Divan, a compendium of his poetry,
and Rumi's Mathnavi. This selection illustrated the major influences
on my thought at the time.
I forgot to mention this but during my university years I discovered
Kashani's Mahajatol Beiza', which is a Shiite restatement of Ghazzali's
Ihya ol Olum. This book was readily available to me in the high
school's library. I came into the possession of this eight-volume set rather
fortuitously. I once delivered a speech in Al Javad mosque, a rather progressive
congregation in north-central Tehran.
I was then asked to name a book I would like to receive as a token of
the congregation's appreciation, and I named this book. And ever since,
I have never parted company with this book. It was through this book that
I was exposed to the ideas of Imam Mohammad Ghazzali. Before this, I had
only heard Ghazzli's name but I had no knowledge of his Ehya ol Olum,
his Kimiya ye Sa'adat or his other works. Through this work and
later on, through Ghazzali's own writings, I was introduced to his work
more closely and seriously.
I spent a year in England working toward a postgraduate degree in analytical
chemistry. Then I entered the field of philosophy and history of science.
This transition marked a watershed in my intellectual carrier. My philosophical
training in Iran had seldom dealt with the specific issues of modern science,
such as atomic theory or the nature of induction, which clearly illustrate
the rift between modern science and the Aristotelian science.
Neither I nor my Iranian philosophy professors were in a position to
address these problems. But the questions continued to preoccupy me. I
had always wondered if there was a discipline that dealt with such questions.
In England, I went to the psychology department, explained my interests
and was told to inquire at the department of Philosophy of Science. I had
never heard of the discipline before, I immediately matriculated and found
what I had been missing.
Philosophy of science deals with the foundations of the modern science.
Our curriculum included epistemology, classical philosophy, and modern
philosophy. Prior to this, I had heard of Kant, Hume and so on and had
encountered some of their opinions in the philosophical texts such as those
of Motahhari and Tabatabai. Now I realized that those treatments were,
shall we say, insufficient.
Philosophers like Hume and Kant were not only great thinkers in their
own right, but they put their stamp on philosophies that emerged centuries
later as well. The linguistic philosophy or logical positivism, for example,
are based on the philosophies Kant, Hume, and others.
The issues that the philosophy of science considers, -- whether science
is an accumulative process or value-free, whether people's prejudgements
and world-views affect the course of science, and so on -- can be viewed
from the perspective of the history of science as well. This discipline
explores the development and interaction of scientific ideas in such diverse
disciplines as history, physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy.
The first philosopher of science I encountered was Karl Popper, who
was by then retired but his students were quite influential. Professor
Post of Chelsea College, who taught philosophy of science, was a close
friend of Karl Popper's and an eloquent interpreter of his philosophy.
The year 1974, the year I started my studies in the philosophy of science,
coincided with the wider acceptance of the ideas of Thomas Kuhn as well
... CONTINUED
HERE
- Introduction
- Part
one
- Part
two
- Part
three
- Part
four
- Part
five
- Part
six
Interviewer
Mahmoud Sadri is an associate professor
of sociology at Texas Women's University. He has a doctorate in sociology
from New York's New School for Social Research. For more information see
his page at the Texas
Women's University. He is the coauthor, with Aruthur Stinchcombe, of an
article in "Durkheim's Division of Labor: 1893-1993" Presses
Universitaires de France, 1993. To top
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