Specters of Spinoza in Iran: The Crisis of Theocracy and the Reception of Spinoza

Abstract

Although Spinoza and, for that matter, modern European philosophers were known among some Iranians for centuries, it was not until the final decades of the twentieth century that they were eventually received into the Iranian intellectual scene. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, whenever there came about a perception of a need, Iranians, the state as well as the civil society, actively and extensively borrowed from the European intellectual achievements. But not in philosophy. Except among radical fringe circles, a need for modern philosophy did not arise until the crisis of the theocratic state exposed the inadequacy of our native philosophical traditions for underwriting a modern state. The turn to modern philosophy reflects the dawning of this awareness, at least in civil society. In this turn Spinoza occupies a privileged place due to the exceptional potencies of his vision, and its pertinence to a theocratic situation that is in crisis both in its ethics and its metaphysics of power.