The fourth generation
... of Iranian intellectuals
By Ramin Jahanbegloo
November 9, 2000
The Iranian
"There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery
to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to
see the stars in broad daylight". -- Vaclav Havel
Controversies between Iranian intellectuals about the destiny of Iranian
intellectual history play a big part in Iranian life as nationalism and
religion.Whether one dislikes it, welcomes or deplores it, the fact remains
that the clerks (to borrow a concept from Julien Benda) of Tehran still
play a role in the Iranian society and exercise an influence on the political
future of Iran.
The Iranian intelligentsia is torn between the aspiration to universal
values and the particularist attitudes of the national situation; between
attachment to democratic ideas and a taste for enlightened tyrants; between
revolt against the state power and subordination to totalitarian ideologies,
between the acceptance of instrumental rationality and the rejection of
critical rationality.
It seems to me that this curious mixture constitutes the essence of
modern Iranian intellectual heritage. Our relation as intellectuals with
the Iranian intellectual history itself creates an intellectual question
of the first magnitude, which is quite natural since our reflection on
the history of Iranian intellectuals is also a self-reflection. Among the
multiple aspects of this question, one is particularly important here:
How can a group of young Iranian intellectuals challenge the cultural and
intellectual soil that defines, delimits and constrains them?
There are two points here. The first point is that critical reflection
is the rupture of a closure and the shaking of received truths, including
and especially intellectual ones. The second point is that the Iranian
intellectual heritage that we inherit today represents itself to us as
a closure which could and should be broken, not for the mere pleasure of
doing so, but because such is the exigency with which we are confronted
by our own activity of critical thinking.
A critical reflection worthy of this name should be able to find in
a philosophical struggle against all forms of ideological mystification
a radical way of seeking answers to the above questions. Such a reflective
experience is today that of the Fourth Generation of Iranian intellectuals,
who have turned a critical eye toward their intellectual heritage, provoking
a wave of analytical and critical research on the lives and works of some
of its most representative figures like Jalal Al-Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Ahmad
Fardid or EhsanTabari.
Such an intellectual reaction could be seen as part of the natural generational
change of intellectual life in Iran, where patricide has a long distinguished
history. But in this case it is also an invitation to a serious reconsideration
of a long-standing tradition of illiberalism and anti-humanism in modern
Iranian intellectual history, of which Iranian post-modern attitude is
only one recent form.
If anti-humanism was in fact a virtual rallying cry for ideological
intellectuals in Iran in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it developed through
very different strategies and very different perspectives. The Iranian
anti-humanism of the these decades grew out of intellectual interpretations
that derived from orientations as different as Marxism, on the one hand,
and Heideggerian deconstruction of rationality to the other.
For the ideological generation of Iranian intellectuals after the Second
World War, the basic theme was clearly in the project of carrying out a
radical critique of subjectivity. The constitutive autonomy of subjectivity
which is the liberal and pluralist claim of the metaphysical subject to
mastery over its thoughts and actions and its claim to moral and political
autonomy was assimilated by the ideological generation of Iranian intellectuals
to a monadic bourgeois egoism.
Therefore, the practice of ideological rationality extended this negation
of subjectivity into a formidable destruction of the idea of intersubjectivity.
In other words, the critique of subjectivity among the ideological generation
of Iranian intellectuals turned to be at the same time as a critique of
democracy, the Marxist one conducted in the name of an ideal future, and
the Heideggerian one, depending openly on the pre-modern islamic traditions.
There is no need to point out that today in Iran, the anti-humanist
attitude of the ideological intellectuals of the 1950s,1960s and 1970s
has collapsed. The reasons for this collapse should be mentioned : they
depend in part on the internal mutations of the Iranian society which in
the last 20 years has been substantially restructured on the economic,
social, cultural and political levels by a younger generation of Iranians.
The election of Khatami in May 1997 was through the emergence of a new
political force -- youth -- inspired by simultaneously individualist and
democratic ideals that are incompatible in every respect with the authoritarian
values and symbols traditionally associated in the Iranian intellectual
arena with Marxist and Heideggerian World views. It is in this new social
atmosphere that the emergence of a global community or a cyberpolis was
able to reveal to the Iranian youth the true nature of instrumental rationality
as modern universal standards.
This new faith among the Iranian youth in the structures of technical
rationality and its advantages for the political future of the Iranian
Self developed into a critical movement among those who I believe are the
representatives of the Fourth Generation of Iranian intellectuals (mainly
characterized by the journals such as Goftegu and Kiyan).
In contrast with the ideological generation of Iranian intellectuals who
in their encounter with the western modernity favoured a monistic attitude
exemplified by Marxist and Heideggerian philosophies, the Fourth Generation
of Iranian intellectuals decided on a move away and a critical distanciation
from master ideologies.
As a result of this process the methodological position of the new generation
of Iranian intellectuals is characterized by two main philosophical attitudes:
the extension of an anti-utopian thinking on an intersubjective basis on
the one hand, and the urge for a non-imitative dialogical exchange with
the modern values of the West on the other.
Young Iranian intellectuals today sense themselves to be living at the
end of something -- if not at the end of history, then certainly at the
end of a history, more precisely an intellectual history that has defined
their intellectual and political heritage for more than 150 years. Their
concern is less to settle accounts with the intellectual representatives
of illiberalism in Iran than to confront philosophically the phenomenon
itself in modern Iranian thought. One can speak of a revival of liberalism
among the younger Iranian intellectuals as a result of the sociological
and philosophical diagnosis of the concept of modernity, characterized
by a return to dual facets of the modern subject as autonomy and self-reflection.
Unlike the three previous generations what the study of the concept
of modernity has taught the fourth generation of Iranian intellectuals
is that democratic consensus is obtained through dialogue and discussion.
By this I do not mean a consensus about modernist values and against traditional
values, for the two concepts of tradition and modernity will not be spared
from permanent criticism. I mean rather a consensus formed under the conditions
of modernization, which are those of critical rationality.To my mind, this
problem of achieving a social contract under modern conditions of rational
criticism calls for two things among the fourth generation of Iranian intellectuals:
First, saying no to any pregiven consensus on the basis of a traditional
authority or a modern ideology. Second, calling for an institutionalization
of the public debate in the form of rational argumentation. Therefore,
the real dividing line which runs between the Fourth Generation of Iranian
intellectuals and the previous ones is not between progress and nostalgia,
hope and memory, or the past and the future, but between the preachers
of grand narratives and monistic utopias and admirers of dialogue and value
pluralism.
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. In short
what all this means is that the new Iranian intellectual has finally returned
to earth, to here and now, after decades of ideological temptations looking
for salvation in eschatological constructions.
Throughout the modern Iranian intellectual history, intellectual life
was marked by the fact that only a small number of prophet intellectuals
did the thinking for everybody else. The Iranian intellectual and political
scene was divided between the two cultures of traditionalists on one side
and the literary intellectuals on the other.
Today the new generation of Iranian intellectuals represent the third-culture
intellectuals. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it is
a culture of dialogue and tolerance. Unlike the previous intellectual pursuits
of literary intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s, the achievements of the
third-culture intellectuals in Iran are not the marginal disputes of a
quarrelsome mandarin class. We can consider them as the inventors and supporters
of a discursive civil society. In other words they act in support of democratic
projects, not just by subverting the limitations of the Iranian tradition,
but also by inventing and maintaining a culture of civility and tolerance.
Today in a society like Iran where there is a systemic deliberation
deficit, the sentimental leftist view of the intellectual as an avant-garde
guardian of an ideology and the demonizing traditionalist view of the intellectual
as obstructor of national and religious traditions are both shown to be
inadequate to the new Iranian reality. In contrast to the ideological generation
of Iranian intellectuals, who wished to save the key concepts of master
ideologies whose logics were monstruous, the preoccupation of the new generation
of Iranian intellectuals with the concept of negative liberty, its sources,
its fragility and the threats to it, colors all their other concerns.
Taken as the capacity for choice among different alternatives, negative
liberty has become the central framework for a plural view of Iranian history
where teleological and deterministic perspectives are replaced by the adoption
of a self-creative perspective through choice-making. The centrality accorded
to the activity of choice in the constitution of the new Iranian intellectual
space reveals once again the affinities of the younger generation of intellectuals
with the ideals of rational autonomy and value-pluralism as opposed to
the applications of monistic ideas in the Iranian social and political
realm by the previous generation.
The central point here is that the new generation of Iranian intellectuals
have come to think in a different way not only as individuals, but also
as a generation. Looked at more closely it becomes more clear that the
Fourth Generation of Iranian intellectuals have been marked by one big
event, the emergence of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Like a wall of water crashing against the shore, the Revolution disintegrated
in the souls of these young intellectuals leaving them with the difficult
task of living up to and thinking about what was happening in them and
through them. Twenty two years later their distinctive contribution to
the Iranian intellectual debate is not how to choose between morality and
politics,in a society where cynicism and confusion cover the voices of
common sense and civility, but how to forge a politics of responsibility,
in the absence of which only silence and untruth would be.
It is time for us to sink to the bottom of our misery to understand
our truth.
Author
Ramin Jahanbegloo is an associate professor of political science
at the University of Toronto. His book Phoenix:
Conversations with Isaiah Berlin will be published in November 2000.
