Thoughtlessness and Decadence in Iran

Alireza Shomali

Description

Political decay in Islamic societies has for the most part been the subject of structural analyses while philosophical studies have been rare, often speculative and deterministic. Thoughtlessness and Decadence in Iran explores from a theoretical perspective the problem of democracy deficit—or, political decadence—in contemporary Iran and, by implication, in present-day Middle Eastern societies. This decadence, the book argues, is in part a religion-based decadence, and deliverance from it requires collective thoughtfulness about religion. Alireza Shomali conceptualizes the Iranian Reality in terms of a lack of not only good life but also thinking of good living. This thoughtlessness means dissolution of critical consciousness and, as such, it heralds escalating decadence. At this moment of rapid decay, the book argues, thought must become relevant to society: the communicative practice of thinking must emerge to examine the pathologies of a religiously administrated life. Opening a dialogue between Adorno, Strauss, Farabi and Razi, among others, Shomali underlines the critical points of similarity and difference between these thinkers and envisions a "local" emancipatory project that, noting the specifics of the Iranian case, takes lessons from the Western experience without blind imitation.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Headless Babes: Adorno and Thinking about Thinking

2. These Impotent Rebels: Strauss and Modern Decadence

3. God’s Greatest Name: Disparity Dictum and Political Religion

4. So Long as They Stay Asinine: Razi on Reason and Religion

5. The Folklore of Philosophy: Farabi’s Political Philosophy of Religion

Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Islam
• Middle East
• History of the Middle East

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438473802
• Langue: English

Extrait

THOUGHTLESSNESS AND DECADENCE IN IRAN
THOUGHTLESSNESS AND DECADENCE IN IRAN
A Sojourn in Comparative Political Theory
Alireza Shomali
Cover image: EA2009.3 Saucer with astrological decoration. Enameled gold. Iran, early 19th century—Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shomali, Alireza, author.
Title: Thoughtlessness and decadence in Iran : a sojourn in comparative political theory / Alireza Shomali.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021844 | ISBN 9781438473796 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438473802 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science—Iran. | Political science—Iran—Philosophy. | Political culture—Iran. | Religion and politics—Iran.
Classification: LCC JA84.I78 S48 2019 | DDC 320.0955—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021844
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In this affliction, the temper of time is that of decadence
O Hafez, where is the Wiseman’s thought and the Brahman’s advice?
—Hafez-e Shirazi
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Headless Babes: Adorno and Thinking about Thinking
Chapter 2 These Impotent Rebels: Strauss and Modern Decadence
Chapter 3 God’s Greatest Name: Disparity Dictum and Political Religion
Chapter 4 So Long as They Stay Asinine: Razi on Reason and Religion
Chapter 5 The Folklore of Philosophy: Farabi’s Political Philosophy of Religion
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
In the process of this volume’s formation, I received insightful suggestions from Hoseyn Bashiriyeh, Mehrzad Boroujerdi, and the anonymous reviewers. For that I am grateful. I thank my student research assistants Jessica Kruger, Taylor Matook, and Amber-Marie Wright, and appreciate all the members of SUNY Press—in particular the Senior Acquisition Editor, Michael Rinella, and the Senior Book Production Editor, Eileen Nizer—for their careful efforts in the publishing of this book. Portions of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 were originally, and respectively, published by the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain Ireland (“A Theoretical Component of Political Inegalitarianism in Perso-Islamicate Thought,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain Ireland 27, no. 2 [2017], 225–254. Copyright © Royal Asiatic Society, published by Cambridge University Press) and Iranian Studies (“Razi on Reason and Political Authority: A Study in Medieval Persian Political Thought.” Iranian Studies 49, no. 1 [2016], 29–55. Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies, reprinted by permission of Taylor Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The International Society for Iranian Studies). I kindly thank them for their permission to utilize the articles in this work. I would also like to thank the Ashmolean Museum for permitting the reproduction of the artwork (EA2009.3 Saucer with astrological decoration. Enamelled gold. Iran, early 19th century—Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford). Finally, I am grateful to my coleagues at Wheaton College (in Massachusetts)—Gerard Huiskamp and Gabriela Torres, in particular—for their support during past few years, while I was carrying out this project.
Introduction
A child, named Felicity, has long vanished
She has perky eyes, and hair—as long as our dream
Whoever knows anything about her, please write to us
Here is our address:
Persian Gulf to our south, Caspian Sea to our north.
—M. R. Shafi’i Kadkani, 2009
“The most important thing,” said Socrates (Plato 1997e, 42) when his own days were numbered, “is not life, but the good life.” Shafi’i Kadkani’s poetry presents the absence of this most important thing in the poet’s own society. The poetry attests to an absence: we, the poet plaints, experience good life in its lacking. “When the spirit of a people is perverted to the point of feeding” an ignoble society, writes Paul Ricoeur (1992, 256), “it is finally in the moral consciousness of a small number of individuals, inaccessible to fear and to corruption, that the spirit takes refuge, once it has fled the now-criminal institutions.” Through the wounded words of such individuals, poetry mourns for the damaged life:
We have witnessed the fall of truth
We have witnessed the smash of human
We have crossed through the catastrophe
For a while, we flamed in suffering
And, now, we are fume in memories
“We are soaring to eminence”—we were told
Yet, we saw the move is downward
This, that you read, is not a white poem
This, is the black box of the crash. (Shafi’i Kadkani 1998, 214–15)
The phenomenon of society “becomes directly perceptible where it hurts” (Adorno 2002, 36). Accordingly, poetry’s allusion to suffering may lodge an indirect awareness of social pathologies that hurt. Suffering may harbor a resentment for what is, and highlight “the lack” (Lyotard 2013, 123), the absence of what ought to be : The lack is, and it is the lack that is painful. Poetry’s lending words to suffering, therefore, can mediate an understanding of the present in terms of a lack, qua sensing the absent and resenting the existent. Such understanding signifies that there is something more in suffering: a want of noble living. Wounded poetic words may also help shield the awareness of suffering against the dogmas and ideologies that forge a meaning of or purpose for suffering only to de-problematize it and make it tolerable.
Suffering may motivate philosophizing too. 1 Like poetry, philosophizing is “testifying to the presence of the lack with our speech” (Lyotard 2013, 123). In other words, philosophizing is a response to the condition of being haunted by a sense of absence. It demands seeing the deadly present as the decisive lacks of good life, of desiring and thinking of good living, of desire for reflection on our daily life’s desires, and of thought . Poetry and suffering may help the absence of virtuous life become visible. People who feel suffering carved into their flesh might express their distress in poetry; however, the question is whether they are able to rationally deliberate on their condition; to identify its causes and to give an account of their experience. The lack of thinking about the lack, therefore, must become visible too by the very act of thinking that turns around upon itself, subjecting itself and its deficit to further reflection. 2 Philosophizing requires this thinking about political decadence and social pathologies; the missing of felicity; the felicity that is missing; the knowing-what of noble life and the knowing-how to attain it. Philosophizing requires thinking about the lack of what Ricoeur (1992, 172; emphasis in original) calls the “ethical intention [that is,] aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions .” Ethical intention lodges the desire for rational and deliberative desires in life. As such, it is prior to particular, everyday desires, as it demands the latter be tested for their reasonability and justice. Philosophizing—or thought —enacts this reflection/testing dialogically, in speech and through rational arguments that publicly articulate just and unjust, expedient and inexpedient. After all, one is a true human being (qua zoon logikon ) only if one in association with others can talk of the justness of society, affirming “the identity of speech and thought, which together are logos ” (Arendt 2004, 441; emphasis in original). And, one is a natural human (qua zoon politikon ) only if one uses language, not coercion, in order to affect others by reasoning. The moment of philosophizing is when the desire for good living comes to concern itself with the present reality, “when the lack from which we suffer, as individuals or as collectivities … is named and, by being named, transformed” (Lyotard 2013, 122). Philosophizing is to interpret the lack in terms of political decadence and investigate its meaning, causes, conditions, sociopolitical outcomes, and remedies. This “naming” of the lost nobility alters citizens’ passivity into action, revives their desire for reflective desires, and awakens the sense of responsibility for who they are and become. Philosophizing, therefore, is a political intervention in whose course the suffering subject—which in its pathetic experience is not distinct from other animals—develops into the active, determining self who intervenes against the ignobility of the sociopolitical reality. This intervention, this resistance through the practice of thinking and examining, signals the birth of the human active selves that should become the collective agent of emancipatory actions.
A society is irrational where the unfettering of citizens whose cooperation sustains the society runs counter to the society’s organizational purpose and actual dynamism, and where human beings’ self-fulfillment into rational and virtuous selves is blocked by citizens’ patterns of social interaction. Accordingly, the irrationality of such society is inseparable from the irrationality of its citizens. For the Aristotelian falasafa, the nature of a being is its end—that is, the very being when fully developed, perfected, and having reached self-sufficiency and completion by flourishing its potentials. An ignoble society prevents the perfection of cit