Children of Paradise (11 page)

There was, he understood, a universe of thought he had yet to uncover. To the extent they dealt at all in twentieth-century thought, Iranian philosophy departments had absorbed some of the ideas of the continental European philosophers, particularly the French and Germans. These were the grand visions of the Western tradition, the ones that moved like tectonic plates beneath a convulsive Europe, and their appeal to a politically inflamed Iranian intelligentsia was unsurprising. Iranian universities all but ignored the parallel Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy, which tended to emphasize logic, language, and epistemology—the questions of what human beings knew and how they knew it.

The analytic philosophers did not write of the “World Spirit,” of Being or Nothingness or Time. Rather, they bored into the minute problems of human apprehension with mathematical precision, and without the soaring rhetoric or thunderbolts of insight that yoked continental philosophy to the aspirations and anxieties of its time. By comparison, analytic philosophy could seem arid and trivial, and Iranians had seen no reason to import it. And so it was in Passmore’s book that Soroush discovered a school of thought to which he’d had no exposure, and which was by far the better fit for his scientific mind. It was from Passmore that Soroush first heard of Karl Popper’s contributions to the philosophy of science. Other theorists had puzzled over the problem of induction: How exactly did scientists draw general conclusions from specific observations? Popper rejected even the existence of such a problem. Science did not start from observations and build toward generalities. Rather, the human mind tended already to generalize, often wrongly. The job of science was to test these generalities by making specific observations. That was why scientists subjected their assumptions to empirical tests.

A theory was scientific, according to Popper, if it could be disproved. The statement “All tigers are carnivorous” could be disproved by the discovery of just one tiger that was not carnivorous. That was what made it a
scientific—testable—hypothesis. On the other hand, a theory was unscientific if all possible observations could simply be adduced in its support: Marxism, for instance, and psychoanalysis too easily explained all outcomes as further support for their theses.

There was a humility at the heart of this view, and it appealed to Soroush. The human mind did not apprehend truth at a glance—not through observation, not through totalizing theories, however brilliant, and not by induction. Perhaps it did not perceive truth at all. Rather, the scientist toiled at sweeping cobwebs from a well in the hope of an ever clearer—but never unobstructed—view of what lay at its bottom. He arrived not at the truth but at an ever lesser falsity. And the so-called pseudosciences Popper railed against—from Marxism and psychoanalysis to astrology—could not hope for even that much.

Soroush’s link to Popper was forged with Passmore’s seven-page summary and with this simple and lasting principle of the scientific method, known as falsifiability. His affinity for Popper was deep; it was not an accidental convergence of opinion on one or even several matters, nor an instrumental appreciation for the uses of an idea, although at the start he may have seen it that way. Soroush came to share the basic skepticism of Popper’s outlook, his impatience with obscurantism or magical thinking of any kind, his love of transparent prose and logical argument. He would later say that he learned from Popper how easy it was to philosophize and how difficult to speak with true academic rigor.

Soroush approached the psychology department at his university and explained that he wanted to study the theoretical foundations of science. For the first time he was told that the discipline of his imagination indeed existed. It was called the philosophy of science, and Soroush should bring his query to that department at Chelsea College at the University of London. That was where Soroush continued his studies. There, in the 1970s, Soroush read Kant and Hume unmediated by the Iranian religious thinkers, like Ayatollah Motahhari, in whose work he’d first heard of them. He delved into linguistic philosophy and positivism, the works of Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos and Popper, whose close friend and scholar
Heinz Post was one of Soroush’s professors. Simultaneously, he studied chemistry.

It was the philosophy, in its headiest, most abstract forms—epistemology, metaphysics—that consumed Soroush. It infused all he ate and saw and breathed; it was the impulse that moved his limbs and animated his tongue; he wrote a whole book (albeit a short one) while sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, reversed a lifetime of his own thought in a day. Privately he gave this time in his life a name: it was the Period of Constant Contemplation. To his sorrow, Rumi’s poetry, which he’d always loved, lost its resonance for him in those years; but while he would find his way back to Rumi later in life, other changes were hard-won and lasting.

The Islamic philosophy Soroush had studied in Iran included theories of the mind and soul, but it had not touched on the question of whether human knowledge could truly apprehend the essences of things. His course of study in Britain pressed precisely on this question, challenging many of his assumptions. As Soroush would explain later, as a man of faith, he had been educated to believe that man was immersed in an ocean of certainties, floating from one to the next. But as a student of philosophy, he came to see that instead a person drifted from conjecture to conjecture, doubt to doubt.

With certainty, the determinism he had understood to be inherent to Iranian Islamic thought also crumbled in Soroush’s hands. Islamic scholars believed that the will of God ordered the world and its events. Humans fulfilled their divinely ordained destinies. The problem of free will—could people then be independent, rational agents, or were they merely vehicles for the will of God?—bedeviled Iran’s philosophers, theologians, and jurists. Even Khomeini, Soroush would note, remarked once that if the hidden imam were one day to appear before him, he would be sure to ask him how to solve the problem of free will.

One day, in Soroush’s class on epistemology, the British philosopher Donald Gillies proffered a hypothetical scenario. We are all sitting in this room, doing our own jobs, he said. But suppose that a very powerful magnet is surrounding us. We know nothing about this magnet, but because it is there, the behavior of everything in the room will change. We think it’s
natural. But if we knew about the magnet, then we could see that these actions are actually unnatural, even violent.

This was the thought experiment that changed the very flavor of the air Soroush breathed. What about the whole universe? he wondered. What about the planet Earth? And if we were surrounded by unknown fields of energy, what, then, of our experiments? We thought they showed us what was going on in nature. But maybe nature itself was influenced by forces of which we were not aware. Maybe, when we spoke of causes and effects, we isolated the wrong causes or were blind to factors that were just as necessary in producing their effects. This was the beginning of Soroush’s turn toward indeterminism and away from dogma. To embrace indeterminism, he understood, was to open a whole new universe—in morality, in epistemology, even in politics.

• • •

P
OLITICS, FOR THE COMMUNITY
of Iranian oppositionists in exile, led nowhere more directly than to Shariati. Soroush admired and learned from Shariati’s work, but he was also troubled by what he saw as Shariati’s manipulation of the religious narrative. To make Shiism revolutionary, Shariati had chosen certain heroes from among its pantheon—most important, Imam Hossein, who died resisting his oppressors in Karbala. But Imam Hassan, who had chosen the path of peace with the same oppressors, Shariati passed over in silence. Soroush was uneasy with this selection. Among the twelve Shiite imams, Hossein was uniquely militant. But Shariati had made the exception the rule, rendering Hossein’s martyrdom the soul of a revolutionary Islam. To Soroush, this indicated that Shariati was more committed to mobilizing his listeners than to seeking truth, whether historical or theological. Shariati’s aspirations for Iran, and his hatred of injustice, were noble. But he disparaged democracy, which was problematic, and he sacrificed truth for dogma, which was unforgivable. Years later Soroush would tell an interviewer, in reference to Shariati, “
We always have a duty to break idols.”

Back in the seventies, Soroush fought Shariati on Khomeini’s behalf.
He was waging a battle against the ideas of the left, which he saw as threatening to religion. Shariati, he felt, had borrowed too much from Marxism. Soroush devoured volume after volume of Marx in an effort to build a case against the German socialist on behalf of Khomeini’s Islam. And so he was thrilled to discover that a powerful weapon against both Marx and Hegel—and thus, too, against Shariati—had existed all the while, untranslated into Persian. It was Popper’s
The Open Society and Its Enemies
, which Soroush read in 1974.

Popper had been a Marxist in his youth, but eventually abandoned both Freud and Marx for Einstein, whose theory of relativity dazzled him not only with its brilliance but with its daring: here was a theory that predicted events that seemed wildly improbable, one that could be definitively refuted through experiments. Freud and Marx, on the other hand, left no such exposed flank, and Popper’s respect for them plummeted by the comparison. Popper retained real feeling for Marx, particularly for the humanitarian impulse behind his concern for the economically disadvantaged. And yet,
The Open Society and Its Enemies
was nothing short of a scorched-earth attack on Marxism and its progenitors.

Published in 1945—eight years after Popper, whose parents were Jewish, fled Austria in anticipation of the Anschluss—Popper’s two-volume magnum opus traced what he believed was a lineage of totalitarian political thought from Plato, through Aristotle, to Hegel and Marx. Along the way, he made a passionate brief for the liberal state, where he envisioned individuals engaged in free, rational dispute and whose institutions were designed to hold the power of the state in check. Liberalism promised a state as imperfect as human science, justice as occluded as truth. But an open society contained the tools for its own betterment, Popper believed, for it allowed the free exercise of the rational mind. Ideologies that made utopian promises, by contrast, tended to produce men in chains and hell on earth.

Soroush had no interest in the affirmative part of Popper’s view. He was not, at that time, a liberal. He saw in
The Open Society
merely a cudgel to use against Hegel and Marx in the name not of liberalism but of utopian Islam. And Popper’s loathing for Hegel was particularly satisfying under
the circumstances. Popper believed that Hegel’s “oracular” style of writing—bombastic, consisting of pronouncements rather than arguments and thus hostile to rational challenge—had done much to mystify and evacuate European philosophy. Worse, in Hegel’s work Popper saw seeds of Nazism: the belief that might made right, a romantic tribalism, and a call for blind submission to authority.

But Popper hated dialectics most of all. Critics would argue that Popper oversimplified and misunderstood Hegel’s theory, which suggested a corkscrew motion to logic or history by which a thesis and its antithesis yielded a new truth. To Popper this was plainly irrational, a sort of sterile hocus-pocus that dazzled the young. Upon finding contradictory evidence, scientists and logicians jettisoned their hypotheses and concocted new ones. But in Hegel’s dialectic, as Popper crudely understood it, contradictions did not disprove theories; rather, the two contradictory theories were married, subsumed within a synthetic truth. Here was an unfalsifiable idea—one that purported to explain everything and its opposite and so explained nothing while stopping inquiry in its tracks. Soroush would draw on this critique to counter the dialectical thinking of Iranian Marxists and Shariati enthusiasts.

Of still more interest to Soroush was Popper’s case against Marx. Popper rejected historical determinism, or the belief that history was governed by iron laws whose outcomes were predictable, as bad science as well as bad politics. Historical determinists, Popper observed, tended to overread general trends, like the trend toward the advance of technology or toward increasing class polarization, interpreting them as laws, vectors of inevitability. But trends were not laws. They could halt or reverse without warning. There was no science to support the assumption that technology would advance indefinitely or that the poor would grow ever poorer, the rich ever richer. Rather, it was a basic human fallacy—the inductive fallacy, with which Popper had tried to do away in the philosophy of science—to believe that what we observed one day and the next, we would also observe the following day. History depended on an untidy welter of variables, the consequences of which were often unintended and unforeseeable, and the
agents of which included individuals, who exercised free will. To argue that those individuals were preprogrammed by their national identity (Hegel) or their social class (Marx) to behave as they did or value what they valued was reactionary, for it was to turn history and politics over to irrational forces, “
banishing the power of cool and critical judgment and destroying the belief that by the use of reason we may change the world.”

Popper’s critics have argued that what Popper called Marx’s historical “prophecy” was not integral to Marxism—that Popper focused exclusively on
Capital
, while in his early and late writings, Marx was not a determinist at all. In Europe, whole schools of post-Marxist thought emerged from the internal debates among Marxists about the role of human agency and free will.

Nonetheless, Popper’s dispute with the Marxists of his day was a substantial one. Many Marxists believed that political freedoms, like the freedom of expression or association, were mere formalities when economic inequality enslaved people. Popper saw it the other way around. No kind of justice, certainly not economic justice, could be rendered in a state under opaque, autocratic control. “
The dogma that economic power is at the root of all evil must be discarded,” Popper wrote. “Its place must be taken by an understanding of the dangers of
any
form of uncontrolled power.”