The Borders of Things

Reading Habermas in Tehran

Here is a fantastic interview with Iranian philosopher and scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo that offers some profound insights into the current state of critical thought in Iran, and encouragement for me after my last blog post. It is also represents, I think, an implicit chastisement of Western intellectualism that often forgets its moorings.

Tragically, Ramin Jahanbegloo has been held in prison since April of this year. Here is a blog tracking his story.

One of the more profound assessments of modernity and its dissidents I've read:

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. [. . .] 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.”