Dariush Shayegan Passed Away at 83

Dariush Shayegan, a writer and philosopher, passed away on Thursday, March 22, at the age of 83 in Tehran. Shayegan had been in a coma at Firouzgar Hospital in Tehran since suffering a stroke on January 25. The death of this thinker, who returned to Iran in the 1990s after years of living in France, has sparked numerous reactions on social media. Among them, Abbas Salehi, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, wrote in a Twitter message: 'The concern for Iranian-Eastern identity in the modern world was a serious concern of Dariush Shayegan.' This Iranian writer and philosopher, who preferred to be referred to as a 'free thinker,' published numerous works in Persian and French, including 'Asia Against the West,' 'Religions and Philosophical Schools of India,' 'The New Enchantment, Fragmented Identity and Mobile Thought,' 'Under the Skies of the World,' 'Mental Idols and Eternal Memories,' 'What is Religious Revolution?', 'The Five Realms of Presence,' 'In Search of Lost Spaces,' 'Broken Gaze,' and 'The Magical Lantern of Time.' Shayegan completed his primary education at the French-speaking Saint-Louis School in Tehran, where figures such as Sadegh Hedayat, Nima Yushij, and Ali Akbar Siasi also studied. He then went to France and defended his doctoral thesis on Hinduism and Islamic mysticism at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1968. This renowned thinker returned to Iran and taught as a professor of Indology and comparative philosophy at the University of Tehran in the 1970s. During these years, he also founded an institute called the 'Iranian Center for Civilization Studies.' Shayegan left Iran after the 1979 Revolution but returned after 12 years. He received several prestigious international awards, including the Knight of Arts and Letters of France in 2002 and the Grand Medal of the French Language and Literature in 2011. Shayegan believed that 'modernity has caused us to suffer from schizophrenia or psychosis' because, according to him, 'modernity has imposed its value system upon us, and we live between two alien worlds.' This viewpoint, as well as his views on Western civilization, faced criticism. From his first major book 'Asia in the West' to one of his last works 'Broken Gaze,' he warned about the 'nihilism hidden behind Western civilization,' and while he praised manifestations such as the rule of law, civil responsibility, freedom, and individual rights, he criticized the neglect of 'intuitive and present knowledge in Western thought.' According to critics of Shayegan's ideas, his responses to the philosophical-social crisis of the West and East are 'lacking in specific substance,' and the limbo he spoke of and the characteristics of 'thought' and 'remembrance' that he attributed to the West and East are considered unphilosophical by some of his critics. Nevertheless, in an interview about three years before his death with the publication 'Andisheh Pouya,' he stated: 'Our generation messed up.' In this interview, while criticizing the 'severe leftism' and 'heroism' of himself and his contemporaries in the 1960s and 70s, he said: 'We were ahead of Southeast Asia at that time, but then they advanced and succeeded. The reason for our failure, in my opinion, is that we could not endure the pace of change. Now why? I don’t know. Also, we intellectuals of that period were out of touch and did not have a proper analysis of our place in society and our society in the world.' However, he also mentioned in that interview: 'The current generation of young people in Iran has much more awareness than our generation because they live in a different world. Especially Iranian women have made significant progress.'