Q. Let us
begin our interview with your initial acquaintance with Popper.
After you married, you went to Britain and then to the University of
London and Chelsea College. There, you studied chemistry and the
philosophy of science. Is this when you first became acquainted with
Popper - during your university days in Britain - or was it earlier?
A. The fact of the
matter is, when I went to Britain and when I was studying the
philosophy of science, I was looking for a book to read in order to
improve my English whilst also becoming acquainted with Western
philosophy. Fortunately, I found a very good book by the name of
A Hundred Years of Philosophy by John Passmore. The book started
with an account of the views of philosophers such as Frege, went on
to philosophers such as Ryle, Moore, Russell and Whitehead, and
ended with philosophers such as Wittgenstein. It was through this
book that I became acquainted with Popper. Not many pages had been
devoted to him in the book, but, even so, it was here that I first
came across his ideas, including the idea of falsifiability. And
this information proved useful to me when I went to Chelsea
College's philosophy of science department for an interview. The
head of the department asked me if I knew anything about the
philosophy of science. I mentioned Popper's name and spoke about
falsifiability, in as much as I understood it then. Later, when I
registered as a student in the field of the philosophy of science,
Karl Popper was one of the philosophers that people were talking
about a great deal. Interestingly, a little earlier, Popper had been
working as a professor at LSE [London School of Economics;
insertions in square brackets are translator's notes], which was
just a few streets away from Chelsea College. Of course, when I went
to Britain, Popper had already retired and was living somewhere
outside London.
Q. You mentioned a
book in which you came across Popper's name for the first time. Do
you remember what year that was?
A. It was 1973. I
don't remember whether I bought the book just by chance or whether
someone had recommended it to me. Later, I heard that Mr
Ma'sumi-Hamadani was translating it, but, apparently, he stopped
midway and never finished the translation.
Q. After reading
the book, did you acquire a particular interest in Popper? Did his
name stick in your mind?
A. Yes, as you say,
Popper's name stuck in my mind after that. I found his notion of
"fasifiability" particularly interesting, I had a feeling that it
was an idea unlike other ideas and that it merited reflection. At
the time, I knew absolutely nothing about Popper's social and
political ideas. I became acquainted with Popper's philosophy via
the philosophy of science and empirical philosophy, not political
philosophy.
Q. Hadn't you read
Popper's Poverty of Historicism at the time which had been
translated into Persian?
A. No, I hadn't read
it. When I returned to Iran after the revolution, I saw the Persian
translation of the book and I really found it incomprehensible. It
made me understand why Persian speakers didn't know anything about
Popper's philosophy. It was because the book's translation was
incomprehensible. And once, in Iran, when I was teaching the
philosophy of history, I asked my students to read the book but then
I regretted it and never suggested it again, because I felt that
reading that translation was a waste of time.
Q. Before the
revolution, had you also not seen Reform and Revolution,
which contained Popper's conversations with Marcuse and had been
published in Persian by Kharazmi Publications?
A. No, I hadn't seen
or read that book either. It was in Britain that I became acquainted
with Popper in earnest and, before that, only through John
Passmore's book, as I said.
Q. When you were in
Britain, did you try to get to know Popper better? Did you seek him
out?
A. No, I wasn’t even
able to attend any of his talks because he didn’t often come to
London. I heard from one of my professors that Popper was unhappy
with his colleagues and that he’d said: “I’ll never go back to my
former college because they stabbed me in the back there.” I don’t
know what had happened between him and the other professors and why
he was upset. But, more or less throughout the time I was at Chelsea
College, Popper never gave a talk at LSE, which was his main base,
or at Chelsea. So, I never saw him personally.
If we were occupied
with Popper it wasn’t because we saw him a lot; it was because his
views were constantly being discussed in our department and, each
year, two or three books for or against Popper’s views were being
published and he was very topical. Of course, alongside Popper,
there was also a great deal of interest in Lakatos, who was Popper’s
student and whose philosophy of science was a continuation of
Popper’s philosophy. But Popper was the main focus of interest and
anyone who said anything about the philosophy of science would take
a stance for or against Popper and speak in relation to him. You
couldn’t ignore Popper. All of this was in the philosophy of
science. Later, in the light of my own personal interest and in view
of the fact that I took up the philosophy of history and the
philosophy of religion, I became acquainted with Popper’s other
views too.
Q. Was this
interest in Popper at the time unique to Britain’s academic circles
or was it a global interest?
A. Popper was being
very seriously discussed and debated in Britain and his views were
being covered extensively in academic journals. I still have many of
those journals. One of my professors used to tell me that the
philosophy of science in Britain was under the sway of two people, a
man and a woman: Karl Popper and Mary Hesse. Of course, it wasn’t
the same in the United States. There, Popper was not as well known
as Thomas Kuhn. In 1977, when I went to the US and to Harvard
University’s history of science department, I noticed that Thomas
Kuhn’s works were being read more than Popper’s. Be that as it may,
even then, many of Popper’s works had been translated into various
languages and any student of the philosophy of science had to be
acquainted with his views. You couldn’t study the philosophy of
science and ignore Popper’s views. You had to write at least one
essay about him. But this is not to say that Popper’s philosophy had
engulfed the West like thick smoke, as one of our anti-Popperians
once said!
Q. Was the
extensive interest in Popper in Britain at the time directed at his
views on the philosophy of science or his political ideas? Was he
famous because of his argument about “falsification” or because of
his views about Marxism and fascism and the enemies of freedom?
A. Both. We have two
Poppers: the Popper who was a philosopher of science and the Popper
who was a social philosopher. His status as a philosopher of science
is clear. He holds an elevated position in this respect and he’ll
have a lasting name in the history of the philosophy of science. He
was an amalgam of Hume and Kant; with a much better grasp of
empirical science of course. But his social philosophy, too, was
undoubtedly very important. His Open Society, which was
published after World War II, was highly praised by philosophers
such as Gilbert Ryle and Bertrand Russell. Russell, who wasn’t one
to engage in niceties, said: “Every line in this book teaches us
something.” The book was very well received in Britain and was
rapidly translated into other languages. The book attracted
attention because it told the tale of a malady: why is it that
ideologies that promise to create heaven on earth lead to the
creation of hell on earth? He used historical and political
arguments to explain how this came about. It was here that he said
that, in politics and in medicine, anyone who makes a lot of
promises is a charlatan. Most importantly, as one of the book’s
reviewers put it, Popper hadn’t attacked Marxism’s weak points; he’d
attacked its strong points. He hadn’t made a straw man in order to
be able to knock it down. He’d seen Marx in full strength and
attacked him, whilst also noting Marxism’s good points. They’ve said
the same thing about Popper’s attack on Marxism in this book as they
did about Al-Ghazali. They’ve said that, after Al-Ghazali’s attacks,
Islamic philosophy was never able to stand up straight again. And,
in the West, they’ve said that, after Popper’s attack in The Open
Society and its Enemies Marxism was never able to stand up
straight again in the West.
Q. Did Popper’s
Marxist background make his criticism be taken seriously?
A. Perhaps. At any
rate, Popper’s critique of Marxism in The Open Society was
read in earnest at the time and it had a great impact; just as
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon had a great impact in
France and dealt a severe blow to the Communist Party in France.
Q. You went to
Britain holding a critical view of Marxism and the Tudeh Party
[Iran’s communist party], and, there, you ran into Popper’s views,
which offered a serious critique of Marxism. Was this not what
attracted you especially to Popper’s views?
A. Yes, that’s true,
in the sense that I’d studied Islamic philosophy with several
professors in Iran and, in terms of the critique of Marxism, I’d
mostly read the views of Allameh Tabataba’i and Ayatollah Motahhari.
And, from then on, I’d acquired an anti-Stalinist and anti-Marxist
disposition.
Q. Did your
acquaintance with Popper give your criticism of Marxism a liberal
aspect, in addition to an Islamic aspect?
A. I’m not afraid of
liberalism, but my criticism went deeper than a merely liberal
critique. That is to say, at the time, I didn’t have it in mind to
replace Marxism with liberalism for example. I was mainly interested
in breaking Marxist philosophy. What I’d learnt from Tabataba’i and
Motahhari had more of a philosophical-research aspect, and it hadn’t
been carried out with direct reference to the views of Marx and his
followers, but mostly with reference to the views of Dr Arani [Taqi
Arani (1902-40), an Iranian Marxist intellectual]. At the time,
based on what I had learnt from Tabataba’i and Motahhari, I felt
that I had the key to debunking Marxism. But later I entered a much
bigger world and I found Marx much more attractive than I’d thought.
I found his works and read them. I also found Popper’s critique of
Marx very attractive and, in this way, I entered a new setting,
which did not merely seek to reject Marxism; it was, rather, a new
academic and cultural setting. It was no longer a matter of religion
for me; it had acquired a philosophical aspect. I believed that I
was a bystander, watching a battle and a feud between giant
thinkers, and that I was reaping much benefit from watching this
feud.
Q. When you became
acquainted with Popper and his critique of Marxism, did it affect
the way you viewed developments in Iran? I want to know what your
motives were at the time. Did you think that Popper would be useful
in Iran’s political setting?
A. That’s really not
what I was thinking. Maybe as we approached the end of the Mohammad
Reza Shah era and as the revolution was gaining momentum, my
attention was drawn to Iranian society a bit more. At the time, I
was interested in understanding and knowing Islam. I believed that,
if I understood Marxism’s weak points, I could be of more service to
Islamic thought. When I became acquainted with Popper and his
critique of Marxism, it was, as a said, a very attractive academic
and cultural experience for me. In the debates, I could hear the
clattering of the swords wielded by various feuding thinkers; I
could see one retreating and another advancing. This was what I
enjoyed. I gave a great deal of thought to Marxism’s theory of
knowledge, in particular, because I was deeply immersed in
epistemology. And also to Popper’s criticism of Plato and Hegel
which was very powerful. Hegel’s statements about scientific matters
were especially extraordinary and Popper had really shown him up and
likened him to a magician who suddenly pulls a dove out of his
handkerchief and makes it fly. I realized then how difficult it is
to speak with academic rigour and how easy it is to philosophize.
Q. So, at the time,
you weren’t like Popper, who was criticizing Marxism on the basis of
libertarian and pro-freedom concerns. You wanted to be of service to
religion. And you saw the fact that Popper had stood up to Marxism
as useful to that end. Popper’s feud with Marxism was a tool with
which you could weaken Marxism. Is that right?
A. I didn’t go towards
Popper in order to obtain a tool or to sharpen a sword, but I felt
that Popper was providing me with the best tools for strengthening a
thinking in which I believed and for tackling a danger to it that I
wanted to thwart. At the time, liberalism didn’t seem as attractive
to me as it does now. What I found attractive was the concept of
freedom in philosophy and in science.
Q. Be that as it
may, in his critique of Marxism, Popper was criticizing an
ideological form of thought and he was of the general view that
anyone who promises heaven on earth will drag people to hell. He was
defending a free and libertarian polity. It seems that, at the time,
you weren’t that concerned with this stream in Popper’s thinking;
you approached his feud with Marxism from the perspective of the
philosophy of science and you also used it in Islamic thought.
A. Yes, this was at
first the case.
Q. So, you hadn’t
established much of a link yet with the political and pro-freedom
spirit of Popper’s thinking?
A. No, I just felt
that a powerful rival by the name of Marx had been knocked down by a
strongman by the name of Popper. And since that rival was also
Islam’s rival, that was very valuable to me. I had learnt from
Tabataba’i and Motahhari that Marx was Islam’s enemy and, now, I was
glad that I, too, had acquired a weapon with which I could attack
this enemy. It was only years later that I understood the true
meaning of liberalism and I owe this understanding to Popper, Marx,
Kant, Hayek, Rawls and others. Being a proponent of freedom is one
thing and liberalism is another thing. Liberalism means the creed of
rights (as against the creed of duties), not licentiousness, which
is how some people have tried to portray it to the public. Of
course, my own reflections also played a part.
Q. So, when did
Popper’s political philosophy and its libertarian spirit first catch
your attention?
A. I first turned to
Popper’s political philosophy when one of my professors in the
philosophy department of Chelsea College asked me to write an essay
about Popper. In order to write the essay, I referred to Popper’s
Open Society and I wrote the essay on “Essentialism in the
Social Sciences”. As you know, Popper is of the view that talking
about essence and nature is not useful or appropriate anywhere;
particularly so in the social sciences. You cannot say that
democracy or the state and politics has an essence. One of the
insightful points that Popper made was that, instead of essence and
nature, we should talk about expectations. For example, what do we
expect of democracy? It was from this perspective that I turned to
Popper’s political philosophy. And I later came across an article by
one of the expounders of Popper’s thought - entitled “Politics
without Essence” - which explained this same point. At the time,
what Popper’s political philosophy meant to me was freedom from
essences and natures in science and philosophy.
Q. Popper believed
that this same essentialism in politics turns even democracy into
tyranny.
A. Yes, that’s right.
In Popper’s view, essentialism and pursuing an essence turns even
democracy into its own antithesis. Hence, instead of talking about
what democracy is and endlessly discussing its essence, we should
explain and demand what we expect from democracy. And if we don’t
achieve what we want, we shouldn’t try to change its essence and our
definition of it; we should demand some other form of polity that
will fulfil our demands and expectations. Popper’s views about
democracy and what we expect from democracy are known and clear to
everyone in Iran today. What Popper is saying is that the important
thing is not the means whereby the ruler is put in place, but the
ease with which the ruler can be removed. Later, I think I expressed
this phrase of his in the following way: democracy is a method of
installing, criticizing and dismissing rulers.
Q. Did your
knowledge of Popper’s political philosophy, which you gained over
time, complement your previous views and ideas? Did you feel that
this new data was filling gaps in your mind or did you sense a clash
and feel that the new data was challenging some of your previous
ideas and views?
A. As I’ve said in the
preamble to the Contraction and Expansion, the tale of the
growth of knowledge is like the growth of a molecule. That is to
say, when a new element is added to a molecule, it undergoes a
fundamental transformation. In fact, what Popper was doing in the
philosophy of science was to examine the qualitative growth of
knowledge. I have no doubt that what I was gleaning from Popper was
being added to the previous data in my mind and, naturally, changing
them. I was quite aware of some of these changes and I could
understand which bricks were falling out of the wall of my knowledge
and which new bricks were replacing them. And some of the changes
were more imperceptible.
Q. What did your
knowledge of Popper’s political philosophy push aside in your mind?
Do you have a mental image of the transformation or not?
A. Yes, two points in
Popper’s political philosophy were and are important to me. One is:
“how to rule is important, not who should rule” (which was Plato’s
question). And the other is: “when it’s raining, we take an
umbrella”; we don’t seek to change the whole order by which clouds
and rain are formed. These two points contain a world of meaning.
But his big impact on me is the one that I mentioned: how easy and
valueless it is to philosophize and how difficult it is to speak
with precision and rigour. It was from then on that vague and
senseless remarks became distasteful to me. One example is the term
“Westoxication”, which is obscurity in obscurity.
Q. I’ll present an
image of you, as an aid to the answer to this question, and ask you
to tell me what you think of it. It seems that, in Britain, while
studying chemistry and the philosophy of science, Abdulkarim Soroush
becomes acquainted with Popper’s ideas and this acquaintance is
mainly with Popper as a philosopher of science. I imagine that you
came back to Iran with a full understanding of Popper as a
philosopher of science but that you didn’t have much to do with
Popper as a political philosopher then. This latter Popper held no
attraction for you because, at the time, politics, the absence of
freedom and the need for freedom were not your preoccupations. In
subsequent years and in view of the practical experience that he
gained of the Islamic Republic, Abdulkarim Soroush gradually
acquired the necessary motivation to turn to Popper’s political
philosophy. Before this, your criticism of Marxism, too, had been
more a critique of a rival ideology than a critique of a dictatorial
and absolutist system. And your critique was more from the
perspective of the philosophy of science than from the perspective
of political philosophy. If Popper said, Some people promise heaven
on earth and drag others to hell, you understood this phrase to be
an attack on Marxism. You sensed no drive to understand this phrase
as a message that was directed at more than Marxism and that the
problem didn’t end there. I believe that, over time and as events
unfolded, your understanding of Popper became more complete and
comprehensive. In this sense, in the years after the revolution,
when you were back in Iran, you went back to Popper. Do you accept
this image?
A. That’s right, more
or less. The extent of my acquaintance with Popper and the
importance that I attached to him never changed. I was interested in
many points in his thought, both when I was in Britain and when I
was in Iran. And when some people made a commotion over Popper, I
was really surprised. I stood there and watched. I didn’t say
anything. And my surprise remains to this day. Of course, I realized
and know that they were criticizing Popper from the perspective of
fascism; it wasn’t done out of concern for religion and academic
rigour. Popper was a philosopher who was useful for us, both for
criticizing Marxism and for untangling some logical and
philosophical quandaries. And for teaching us precision and rigour.
And for exposing those who indulged in vacuous philosophizing. And
he was on good terms with metaphysics too.
Of course, I have to
agree - and maybe this is your aim in asking me this question -
that, after I’d been in Iran for a long time and gained political
experience, the profundity of some of Popper’s teachings became
clear to me and I became much more aware of Popper’s importance. As
you said, I’d read him saying that ideologies build hell instead of
heaven, but I could never understand this in the way that I
understood it 15 years after the revolution.
Yes, you can say that
it was over time that I realized how serious Popper’s ideas were and
I became much more acquainted with his statements about ideologies
and freedom-crushing ideas. Before, it had been like information for
me; later, I saw it in action and experienced it, and this added to
my understanding. The interesting thing is that Popper, too, had
lived in the heart of those experiences and many of the points that
he makes are the expression of his personal experiences. At the same
time, I also became aware of the extent to which philosophy in Iran
had fallen into the hands of people who love to dwell in ambiguity
and obscurity. They don’t offer a single clear definition. They
don’t provide any rational arguments. They’re unacquainted with
academic rigour. Popper once said that one of the resources of
ignorance is to punch holes in words in order to pull out truths. I
witnessed this for myself in Iran when I saw that some “grand
philosophy professors” had no other resource but this and, if you
take the words away from them, they’ll sink into obscurity. Popper
was a philosopher-savant; like Kant. This is the model that I
admired and I admire now, and I consider this to be the correct way
of engaging in philosophy.
Q. When Popper
presented his critique of Marxism, no one criticized him for having
been a Marxist once. He’d paid his dues. You too paid your dues to
Bazargan when you delivered a talk entitled “A man who was Bazargan
[merchant/businessman] by name but not by character”. But what did
you think of the Bazargan government when it was in place, just
after the revolution? Did the fall of the Bazargan government upset
you?
A. The fall of the
provisional government upset me of course. But I saw events of this
kind as the effect of the natural conditions and the chaos of the
early days after the revolution. Be that as it may, I never approved
of the seizure of the US embassy. I even remember that when the
“den” was occupied and revolutionary fervour was at a high and every
day a prominent official or Majlis deputy was going there to deliver
a speech - and I remember that Dr Peyman and our dear friend Mr
Mojtahed-Shabestari, too, delivered speeches there - I rejected the
invitation of friends who asked me to go and speak at the den.
Q. Who were they?
A. I won’t name any
names. It was a well-known figure who may not want to be named. At
any rate, I didn’t accept and I was opposed to some of the events
that were taking place at the time. But I didn’t like Mr Bani-Sadr’s
approach at all either and I didn’t feel any fellowship with him or
work with him.
Q. Of course Mr
Bani-Sadr had serious problems with you and this seemed to go back
to an argument that had taken place between the two of you abroad.
This was why he opposed the suggestion that you should become
culture minister.
A. Yes, I never sought
government posts anyway. The late Bahonar, too, offered me the post
of higher education minister in Mr Raja’i’s government, but I didn’t
accept, and the late Rabbani-Amlashi seriously complained about
this. In Mr Bani-Sadr’s government, too, as you said, they’d made
that suggestion to him, but he rejected it. Later, too, when the
higher education minister (Dr Mo’in), nominated me as the first head
of the Academy, again, I didn’t accept and I truly didn’t seek posts
of this kind. The only official post that I held was membership in
the Cultural Revolution Institute which was an appointment by Imam
Khomeini. And, in accepting this appointment, I wanted to be of
cultural service; that’s all. And I resigned after a while.
Q. You said that
you viewed some of the problems in the early days after the
revolution, including the resignation of the provisional government,
as the kind of events and chaos that were natural in the
circumstances. But it really seems to me that events such as the
seizure of the US embassy, the closure of universities, the pulling
down of the shutters of the provisional government and many other
instances of this kind were not just events that occur naturally
after a revolution. They heralded what was to come, in keeping with
Popper’s prediction I think. And, as it turned out, Popper’s
prediction was right. This is why I think that it’s a shame that you
didn’t join the Bazargan government. It makes me say: A Soroush who
was a proponent of Popper obviously didn’t favour the seizure of the
US embassy, but he could also have spoken out and criticized it.
A. Serving in the
Bazargan government was an honour of course. And if I had joined the
Bazargan government and if they had wanted someone to reform
universities, they may well have chosen me. It wouldn’t have made
any difference. I was appointed to the post by Mr Khomeini and Mr
Bazargan was appointed to his post. In the early days after the
revolution, there was no sense of the current differentiations.
Q. Let’s move on
from these questions. Dr Soroush, is Popper still as attractive to
you today? Do you still consider him an intellectual model or are
there also points in him that you’d criticize?
A. When was Popper
ever a model for me for him to be so today? Philosophy isn’t the
realm of masters and disciples. If I could speak of one person as a
model, it would be Mowlana Jalaleddin Rumi. No one has played as
great a role in my life as he has.
I learnt some very
good points from Popper and, from the start, I was also reading the
critiques of his views. Where’s the philosopher who is beyond
criticism? But there are points in Karl Popper that we must still
value. I mentioned them earlier. For example, the idea that, in
politics, we shouldn’t be asking, “Who should rule,”, but “how to
rule”. This is a very important and profound idea. Also, the phrase
that our dear friend Mr Mostafa Malekian mentioned as a catchphrase
for intellectuals, saying: Intellectualism means reducing rancour
and recounting truth; this is one of Popper’s teachings. In his
footnotes in The Open Society, Popper says: We can’t increase
people’s enjoyment and profit, so, let’s reduce their suffering.
This means reducing rancour. As to recounting truth, this is
Popper’s main teaching. He says that we must constantly strive to
understand the truth, although it isn’t possible to attain it
completely. Popper’s ideas have now been accepted by a large segment
of our society and Popper’s other notions about induction and the
rejection of essence and nature are still of interest and are the
subjects of research.
Q. Have any
criticisms of Popper’s thinking come to your mind over the years?
A. I’ve not only
taught Popper’s views but also the critiques of his views. You
should put your question to those who have been peddling Heidegger
for years but have never noted or pointed out a single blemish on
him. Let me explain something to you and set your mind at rest.
Popper’s creed is the creed of criticism. He defends critical
rationalism and says that we learn through criticism. This is why
Popper is not like a prophet who is above criticism. On the
contrary, it is those who don’t want to criticize Heidegger who are
presenting him as an infallible prophet. Let me also add, that, in
Iran, the anti-Popperians didn’t criticize Popper. They hadn’t even
read his works. They just hurled insults at him. And this was a bad
precedent; insulting philosophers. Criticize Popper! Tear him to
pieces! More power to you! This is precisely what philosophy
consists of: criticism. But why do you insult him? Why do you say
that he imposed idiocy on philosophy? This isn’t scholarly
criticism, is it?
Q. Finally, to
round off our discussion, I’d like to evoke something that was
mentioned in an article quite some time ago where it was suggested
that you had coffee with Popper. You said, of course, that you never
met Popper, but did you ever try to find him or to find his resting
place?
A. One of the things I
like to do when I’m abroad is to visit the resting places of eminent
figures. When I was in the Netherlands, I tried very hard to find
Spinoza’s resting place and I did find it. I looked for Erasmus’s,
too, but then I realized that it’s not in the present-day
Netherlands. In Paris, I visited Descartes’ grave. When I was in
Berlin, I visited Fichte and Hegel’s graves but I couldn’t find
Kant’s; then I realized that his resting place is outside
present-day Germany. I also visited Marx’s grave in London, but I
wasn’t able to visit Martin Luther’s. It may be interesting for you
to learn that, when I was in Germany, I needed to be hospitalized
once. As it happens, the hospital was called Martin Luther. This is
as close as I got to Martin Luther! I’m saying this so that if
anyone is sensitive about my name being associated with Luther’s,
they’ll know that this has been the limit of my association with
him! Be that as it may, I still don’t know where Popper is buried. I
haven’t seen his grave and I didn’t have coffee with him. I have to
say in response to the person who made this claim that, never mind
about telling the truth, he doesn’t even know how to tell a lie. He
is like the ignorant person who wanted to make counterfeit money and
decided to make four-dollar bills. Anyway, I may find Popper’s grave
one day but, alas, I’ve missed the chance to have coffee with him.
Q. Some people have
said, by way of criticism of you, that, when you were a member of
the Cultural Revolution Institute, you were promoting a
counterrevolutionary philosopher like Popper. I’m not concerned with
the sincerity with which the criticism was made, but I want to say,
at any rate, that you entered some revolutionary institutions
accompanied by Popper and the fact of the matter was that Popper’s
thinking was not compatible with a revolution’s big, ideological
promises. If this criticism is directed at you knowledgeably, it is
understandable. At any rate, some people may be worried about the
propagation of Popper in a revolutionary and mass-oriented setting.
This is a possible hypothesis, which needs to be considered. After
all, in his Open Society, Popper was not just criticizing
Marxism; the Marxist order was a token. Hence, going back to Popper
may cause problems for some viewpoints in Iran and it may lead to
the formation of an opposition against revolutionary institutions
and currents.
A. You’ve raised many
points. Allow me to make a few points now in order to clarify
matters. Note that it wasn’t just Popper who was against
revolutions; Kant and Hegel were too, as were many other
philosophers. But the label “counterrevolutionary”, in the
reprehensible sense of the term, doesn’t apply to them. They
presented an analysis of society, human beings and the order of
things, on the basis of which revolutions were, on balance, more
harmful than beneficial. The reason why Popper was against
revolutions was because, one, they destroy traditions and, two, it’s
impossible to reverse their mistakes. In Conjectures and
Refutations, Popper has an excellent essay in which he explains
that if we want to overthrow all our traditions with a revolution,
we will have set ourselves an impossible and undesirable goal. This
was what Popper understood by revolution and this was precisely what
a Leninist and a Stalinist revolution meant. In other words,
precisely the notion of overthrowing the whole order by which clouds
are formed in order to stop it from raining. But it was not as if
Popper was opposed to all uprisings, and what we had in Iran was a
popular and Islamic uprising - not a full-blown revolution - and it
never intended to turn all our traditions upside down.
Although I was
acquainted with Popper’s political philosophy and accepted parts of
it, I didn’t consider him to be opposed to the revolution and his
political philosophy absolutely doesn’t point to such a conclusion.
The people who have attributed this idea to Popper either don’t
grasp his political philosophy or are acting out of some ulterior
motive or are equating Nazism and fascism with being a
revolutionary. Popper has said in his writings that even resorting
to force is permissible in some circumstances and he’s not
absolutely opposed to using force against oppressors. What he is
opposed to is people saying: we want to overthrow society’s
traditions in one fell swoop. Some of these traditions are holding
society together; they should be reformed if necessary, not turned
upside down.
But when you say that
some opponents of Popper in Iran were thinking and worrying about
the future, this is to give them too much credit. They weren’t many,
in any case. They were just two people: the dearly departed
professor and his still very much alive student [Ahmad Fardid and
Reza Davari-Ardakani]. As it happens, their writings and their
utterances all show that they had no knowledge of Popper’s views.
Their anti-Popperism was based on other motives, which I don’t want
to go into now. Fortunately, more recently, the admissions made by
one of them made it entirely clear that, contrary to the impression
that some people had of a Heidegger versus Popper feud, those
quarrels were simply political quarrels, with specific objectives
and aimed at compensating for failure in other areas. No one was
saying anything against Heidegger. They, for their part, didn’t
attack Popper in a scholarly way. Even if we were to enter into
their feud, we’d have to say: When someone - out of his ignorance of
science and scholarship - has said and written so many unscientific
and unscholarly things and gone so far as to describe modern logic
as the offspring of Westoxication, why does he continue to head the
Academy of the Sciences? Why doesn’t he just resign?
Let me underline
again: I see no contradiction between Popper and the Islamic
Revolution. Rather, as you said yourself, things later took a course
that further proved the importance of some of Popper’s insights. As
a member of the Cultural Revolution Institute, I was trying to
spread “academic freedom” and academic freedom was a part of
Popper’s ideas. Popper believed that signs of freedom in society
point to the presence of academic freedom. When I was defending
academic freedom, I absolutely didn’t imagine that I was acting
against the revolution. Any Muslim or non-Muslim can defend academic
freedom and change the fate of our universities.
Q. So what was the
reason for the opposition to Popper at the time? What danger did
they sense that made them go so far as to liken Popper to Gustave Le
Bon in order to belittle him? What interests did Popper’s name
endanger?
A. It wasn’t as if the
people who attacked Popper - and there weren’t many of them - were
concerned about Islam. It wasn’t as if they’d devoted their whole
lives to piety and purity and Islam, and saw the mention of Popper’s
name, as a non-Muslim or an opponent of Muslims, as an offence
against their zeal. Had this been the case, why didn’t they attack
Russell, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre? Why did they even
promote these thinkers at times? The anti-Popperians knew nothing
about Popper, just as they knew nothing about the Hidden Imam whom
they so duplicitously love to propagate. Do you know who they had a
problem with? They had a problem with someone called Abdulkarim
Soroush; end of story. What they were concerned about wasn’t God or
the revolution or religion or philosophy.
Q. Did they covet
your position as a revolutionary ideologue?
A. Do you mean to say
that they became ideologues? You use the word “ideologue”, but their
motives were much more lowly than this.
Q. Mr
Davari-Ardakani has said: If Dr Soroush was a proponent of Popper,
instead of going to the Cultural Revolution Institute, he should
have joined the Bazargan government and supported it. I’m not
concerned with Mr Davari’s antagonistic viewpoint, but don’t you
think that, if Soroush had totally grasped Popper’s insights, it
would have made more sense for him to back the Bazargan government
and to work with it?
A. Of course I never
had Professor Davari’s revolutionary cunning; I didn’t contribute to
“Identity” [“Identity” (Hoviyat) was the name of a series
broadcast on Iranian TV in 1996 that presented some of Iran’s
best-known writers and intellectuals as fifth columnists and
“lackeys” of the West]; I didn’t sign letters against academics; and
I wasn’t a regular contributor to Kayhan newspaper [a major
proponent of programmes such as “Identity”]. At any rate, Mr Hassan
Habibi was both in the government and in the Institute. In the
Institute, we were concerned with cultural work and Mr Bazargan was
concerned with political work and matters of state. In fact, it was
when I saw that Professor Davari had joined the Cultural Revolution
Institute that I decided to resign. I realized that it was no longer
the place for me because I could see that the vigilante groups were
emerging vigilantly from his philosophy and were turning
universities into their rampaging ground. The attacks on university
students in July 1999 and June 2006 were the offspring of this same
philosophy. I suggest that you drop this sad line of inquiry.
Translated from the Persian by
Nilou Mobasser
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