Ideas whose time has come: A Conversation with Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo

a very interesting interview with Iran's greatest philosopher, conducted via email from his solitary confinement... discusses Marx, harbermas, arendt etc. He has a wide range of knowledge and some very interesting thoughts...

"The work of an intellectual requires living on the edge. This is the only way the essence of life can be grasped. This is even truer in a challenging country like Iran. Do you remember the epigraph to Somerset Maugham’s great novel The Razor’s Edge, taken from the Upanishads: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.” I suppose what I am trying to say is that you get used to living with challenges in a society where there is no such thing as a plain and simple life. Life is not easy when you have to live morally in the face of untruth. Maybe intellectuals in Iran have learned to face a life of challenges because the challenge of truth is more crucial to their existence than it is to others. I believe one cannot be a friend of truth without living on the edge. But to do that one has to be gripped by the idea and the passion that life and thought are one. If thinking and aliveness become one for us then certainly we can reach the conclusion that living a challenging life in Iran is a meaningful process. For me as an Iranian philosopher, thinking differently is a form of going beyond the challenges of my daily life in Iran. It’s an opening up to the world which goes hand in hand with the act of being free. I think this internal dialogue with oneself — listening to one’s inner voice, as Gandhi used to say — but also having an acute sense of the world, could be a quest not only to understand the meaning of our world, but also a ceaseless and restless activity of questioning on the nature of the evil that one has to confront in political life.

Read whole interview here.