2 Ibid., 269.
3 Ibid., 269.
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estimate the strength of Sina’s thought by comparison to a mind like
that of Hegel. In the Kitab al-shifa Sina claims that evil is always only a privation, that there is no positive force of evil, and that necessary evils are incidental to the overall rational design of the almighty
creator of man and the Cosmos. This argument, which is too twisted
to rehash in detail for our purposes here, runs counter to the very
core of ancient Iranian thought and it is also illogical on its own
terms.
It does not help Sina that at the end of his life he admits that
this was one of the many lies out of which he wove his philosophy,
because without the Mantiq al-mashriqiyyin we do not know what he truly thought about such matters. In Fi Maqaamaat al-aarifin
Sina destroys any hope we have of attributing a serious political
philosophy to him, because he claims that the legitimacy of the
legislator whose law and order are needed for social stability comes
from divine signs that the Lord gives in order to manifest his power
and demand our obedience to his prophet and vice-regent.4 Sina
legitimates the very Islamic rule that he, in the end, admits oppressed and victimized him.
Of the major thinkers from the period of the zenith of science
and knowledge in Iran after the Islamic conquest, Zakariya Razi
and Omar Khayyam are the two who rejected Islam. Consequently,
one might be inclined to see them as the true “philosophers” of
the period. However, Razi and Khayyam do not develop any new
philosophical concepts or express any unprecedented insights into
the nature of reality or the structure of society. Their philosophical thought is on the level of followers of the Stoic or Epicurean schools in the Roman Empire, both in terms of form and in terms of content.
It is true that both men contributed significantly to the advancement
of scientific knowledge, but this is not the same thing as being a
philosopher.
Most of the work produced by professional so-called
‘philosophers’ in academia today is not philosophy at al . Philosophy
is a kind of thinking that upholds the unity of the sciences, including 4 Ibid., 252.
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political science and aesthetics. Scientific theories and discoveries
may be the product of philosophical thought, insofar as that thought
establishes new fundamental frameworks for seeking and organizing
knowledge, but the philosopher must question basic assumptions in
a way that is not necessary for scientists and inventors. Philosophy
is fundamental thinking on the nature of Truth, Beauty, and Justice.
The person who actual y comes closest to being a genuine
philosopher in Iran during the period in question is Abu Nasr
Farabi (257 Hejri, 870 Miladi). Like Plato and Aristotle, and also like Hegel, Farabi’s thought extends from ontology and epistemology to
ethics, political theory, and aesthetics. However, the work of Farabi
also clearly demonstrates how far Iran remained from producing a
thinker like Hegel and why that is the case. In his Kitab al-burhan (a commentary on Aristotle’s Analytica Posteriora) we see that Farabi has a first-rate logical mind, capable of the most hair-splitting analysis and careful reasoning.5 Yet in his Kitab al-jam ‘bayn ra’yay al-hakimayn, Aflatun al-ilahi wa Aristu he tries to assert that there are no significant differences between Plato and Aristotle, and that
any merely apparent differences in their thinking have to do with
their different ways of life and styles of writing.6 I do not say he
makes an argument for this because no argument can ever be made
for such a preposterous position. Then in Mabadi’ ara’ ahl al-madinat al-fadilah, which I believe was Ayatol ah Khomeini’s favorite book, Farabi adopts the political theory of the ideal state from Plato’s
Republic and has the audacity to claim that Muhammad and the
Imams are essential y what Plato meant by the ideal philosopher-
kings.7
The same problem lies at the basis of these two very
embarrassing expositions. Farabi cannot tolerate intellectual tension
on fundamental questions. For him, if Plato and Aristotle did not
think the same things on the same matters of ultimate importance,
this would be an indictment of human reason as such. The reality
5 Ibid., 93–110.
6 Ibid., 110–118.
7 Ibid., 119–133.
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is that not only does Aristotle argue against Plato repeatedly, on
matters both metaphysical and political, but Plato uses the method
of his dramatic dialogues to constantly argue against himself. He
chooses Socrates as a mouthpiece because he understands that the
philosophical life is a life of fundamental questioning, and only on
account of this can it lead to discoveries. The most famous saying
of Socrates is “Wisdom begins in wonder,” whereas regarding the
attainment of knowledge Farabi says, “If he encounters this meaning,
he rests at it, feels peace with it, and enjoys the removal in him of the harm of wonder and ignorance.”8
Someone who considers wonder a harm does not understand the
first thing about Philosophy. For Farabi knowledge is cumulative.
Plato and Aristotle together attained it, and so they cannot be in
any fundamental disagreement. If they were, it would mean that
both ignorance and wonder persist in even the most powerful
minds precisely because knowledge is not cumulative and discovery
is an ongoing process. Since Farabi is well aware of the essential
connection between ontology or epistemology and political theory,
this incompleteness and mutability of knowledge would mean
not only intellectual unrest but also a threat to the long-term
peace and stability of society. Someone might arrive at a different
understanding of nature, including human nature, that could
for example be reflected in a new political theory that produces
something like the French Revolution.
That possibility unconsciously terrifies Farabi, whereas it was
very clear to Plato (who he claims to revere so much). Socrates was
martyred as a revolutionary political dissident, and Plato is almost
killed himself for experimenting with an ideal state in Syracuse.
Even Aristotle, who is relatively more conservative, had to exile
himself from Athens because as he put it, he did not want to make
the Athenians responsible for murdering two philosophers. Aristotle
ran a think tank that would experiment with different constitutions
for different city-states whose leaders would privately come to him
for advisement. By contrast, Farabi has a mind like that of a Chinese
8 Ibid., 118.
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Confucian. He treats Plato and Aristotle as if they are Confucius.
This is also why he can so perversely equate the philosopher-king
with an Imam.
For Farabi knowledge is fixed and handed-down all tidied-up,
like a divine revelation. As far as I am concerned, there is no native Chinese philosophy. There might be some Buddhist philosophy
which took place in China after Iranian missionaries such as
Bodhidharma brought Mahayana Buddhism there through the Silk
Route. But neither the Confucian nor even the Taoist sages or wise
men can be considered philosophers. The Chinese have this saying,
“May you live in interesting times,” which they consider a curse. It is for this reason that I worry if the Chinese are left as the only bulwark against Islam, the Caliphate may dominate the world because the
Asian mentality – which the Turks and Mongols shared – is actual y
very much in accord with Islam. Farabi has this mentality. He wants
to sit at the foot of silk-robed sages and receive Wisdom. This is also similar to the mentality of guru-worship in India, but the analogy to
Confucianism is more appropriate because Hindu gurus usual y did
not speak on politics.
The precondition for producing a Hegel or Nietzsche is centuries
of dialectical tension, a conflict of fundamental standpoints that
plays itself out in both scientific and political revolutions that
are as productive as they are destructive. The closest conditions
approximating this in the history of Iran were during the Sassanian
period, where we witnessed a conflict between at least four different
worldviews: Manichaeism, Orthodox Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism,
and Sassanian Court Platonism (which had Zurvanite elements). I
have noticed that the tendency in the Iranian Renaissance movement
is to conflate the court Platonism of Khosrow Anushirawan with
orthodox Zoroastrianism and then dismiss Mani and Mazdak’s
revolutionary doctrines as total y degenerate. I imagine that if
European thinkers of the New Right were to advance their own
interpretation of Sassanian Iran they would arrive at the same
conclusion, especial y those who are Traditionalist rather than
Archeo-Futurist. But it is important to remember that Mani was
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endorsed by Shapur the Great and that Mazdak received the support
of Kavad I.
We know that each of these movements had extensive scriptures
produced over a very long period of time. Mazdakism survived
past the Islamic conquest in the form of the Khorramdin and
Qarmatian. Manichaeism spread all the way from northwestern
China to Bulgaria and the South of France. In Europe, in its Bogomil
and Cathar forms, it was such a potent social force that it catalyzed
the Holy Inquisition of the Catholic Church in response to it. If we
were to charitably suppose that the fragments of these movements
that survived both Sassanian state persecution and the Islamic and
Mongol conquests are a pale shadow of what they were in terms of
their sophistication and depth of reflection, then we can postulate
that if the culture of Sassanian Iran had continued for another
century or two, it might have yielded a thinker like Hegel.
Such a man could have analyzed the dynamics of the evolution
of consciousness, in hindsight, understanding the Mazdakite
revolution as a stage in the self-correcting development of reason,
and he could have reflected on the metaphysical shift from
Zoroastrian cosmology to a Manichean or Neo-Platonist cosmology.
As far as I am aware, no other non-Western culture besides Iran ever
had the kind of open conflict between fundamental intellectual and
spiritual standpoints that we see in the late Sassanian period. These
were the birth pangs of an Enlightenment.
When one dismisses Mani and Mazdak as aberrations from
some falsely idealized Khosravani wisdom and virtue, and then
attributes Shapur and Khosrow’s eclectic interest in Neo-Platonism
to the orthodox Zoroastrian Mobeds who were probably nervous
on account of it, one is tidying-up the intellectual, spiritual, and
social conditions of the Sassanian period in a way that denies that an Iranian Hegel was ever even a possibility. An example of this kind of
tidying-up is the reconstruction of Sassanian so-called ‘Philosophy’
that we see in two works by Ibn Miskawayh, a thinker from Rayy
who was born in 320 Hijri or 932 Miladi into a family that had
only recently converted from Zoroastrianism to Islam. His book
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Javidan-Kherad or “The Perennial Philosophy” claims to preserve a Sassanian book of wise sayings and judgments by Hushang Shah,
as well as the sayings of Kasra Qobad, a letter from Bozorgmehr to
Kasra, and “words of wisdom” from Anushiravan.9
Indeed, there are many fine ( nikou) words of wisdom here, in
the sense of sayings of a sage that the Chinese might neatly wrap
up inside a fortune cookie. Some of them are more insightful than
others that must be considered platitudes of the kind you would
find in a 19th century European handbook on morals and proper
etiquette. Even the most profound and penetrating of these sayings
are not connected to each other by any systematic thought process
that could, on account of its principles and logical structure, enter
into a fundamental conflict with a rival system. One would be
hard pressed to find anything in here that a person might die for
or that might drive him to kill another. Compare this to the zeal of
the Manicheans and the martyrdom of around a hundred thousand
Mazdakites at the hands of Khosrow I. Whoever that Khosrow was,
or for that matter whoever Kavad was that he had the audacity to
back a revolutionary as radical as Mazdak, the intellectual force
of these Sassanian period personages is not captured by Javidan
Kherad.
Actual y, the problem is not any specific error on the part of
Ibn Miskawayh but the very idea of Javidan Kherad or “Perennial Philosophy”, which Mohammad Reza Shah resurrected and
institutionalized in the Imperial Academy of Philosophy. This was
the institute in Pahlavi period Iran where Henry Corbin col aborated
with the likes of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Its pariah was Peter Lamborn
Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey). If a society believes that there is an
eternal, unchanging Wisdom that can be definitively attained by a
person living within the present time, and that another intelligent
person need only to study under such a sage to have this knowledge
imparted to him, then that society will never see the kind of scientific and political revolutions that are catalyzed by genuine philosophers
and that are also preconditions for a Hegel who tries to understand
9 Ibid., 276–302.
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what is at work in these revolutions. If I were to believe that Ibn
Miskawayh’s Javidan Kherad adequately represents the intellectual life of Sassanian Iran, then an Iranian Hegel was never possible and
I would even have to wonder whether the reason that Heraclitus did
not accept Darius’ invitation to become the Court Philosopher of
Iran is not for the reason I have repeatedly suggested in interviews
with Iranian Renaissance leaders, but because Heraclitus knew that
in the Court of Iran he would have to become Confucius.
That is the last thing he could ever have become, since dialectical
opposition and generative conflict is the very heart and soul of
Heraclitus’ thought. Nietzsche and Heidegg
er idolize him for
this, and without this mode of thinking on his part, there would
never have been a Plato. Aristotle tel s us that Plato belonged
to the school of Heraclitus in his youth and that what he learned
there remained the foundation for all of his future work. What he
learned was not some piece of information, it was not a cumulative
addition to his knowledge. He learned how to think beneath and
beyond any assumptions, whether cosmological or sociopolitical.
This is extremely dangerous, not only because you might be killed
for expressing what emerges from such thinking, but even more so
because it brings you face to face with an abyss both within yourself
and around you. The revolutionary transition from one framework
of knowledge to another, and the revaluation of fundamental
principles, requires an intellectual equivalent of Pahlavani (Heroism) and Javanmardi (Chivalry) that began with Zarathustra and that you do not see outside of the Āryan world.
I have noticed that even within the Iranian Renaissance
movement there are people who try to read the Gathas of Zarathustra as if they are the Analects of Confucius. This is to completely miss what it is about Zarathustra that makes him total y incomparable
to Confucius. Nietzsche does far more justice to Zarathustra than
those who try to use the Gathas to increase their knowledge, as if by increments. He fundamental y grasps the spirit of the man and
claims that were that man alive today he would teach almost exactly
the opposite of everything that he taught in his own time and place.
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This is an exaggeration on Nietzsche’s part, but his essential insight is absolutely right. Nietzsche grasps the form of Zarathustra’s thought
and the ethos of this personality, an epitome of the “Promethean”
or “Faustian” spirit characteristic of the Āryan genius long before
Aeschylus’ Prometheus or Goethe’s Faust.
Yet I do not mean to suggest in any way that Iran’s greatness lies
only in the past. Islam is according to its own claim the third and
final of the Abrahamic revelations. So if the fact that it cannot be
reformed also means that once Iranians are fed up with it they will
reject the religion in its entirety, then in a sense Iran has the potential to suddenly leap ahead of Europe. The Abrahamic religions are a
three-stage project and Europe is only now being prepared to move
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