‘To mean or not to mean?’ as the underlying question of Western-inspired counter-Enlightenment discourse in Iran

Modern Western thought relevant for the Constitutional movement and beyond mainly entered the Iranian scene in the form of the Enlightenment doctrine of the autonomous human subject and of various types of 19th century positivism. The forms of Western thought that served as underpinnings for the official intellectual discourse in the Pahlavi era tended to be narrowed down to a kind of means-ends rationalism, mostly in the shape of technology. These ways of thought all assume a total reducibility of human being, thus essentialising human being in a reduction- ist fashion.
This paper tries to show that important counter currents to the official intel- lectual discourse starting from the early 1960s challenge the reducibilty of human being to some essence as depriving it of meaning. Many trends of the so called ‘return to self’ movement, in this context, draw on a combination of non-estab- lishment religious discourse and Heideggerianism. This combination serves those intellectuals adopting it to confront the absolutist claim of positivist and Enlighten- ment thinking and to upgrade religion, albeit in some non-traditional form, from a mode of thinking and practice to an active force shaping the future. Beneath the surface of these particular concerns, the debate between Heidegger inspired cri- tique of Enlightenment thought in Iran and Enlightenment thought in Iran, in the final analysis, is about whether human being has meaning or not.