The Iranian Yearbook of Phenomenology

In America, it is common to hear people say that they “hate kids” even in an era of political correctness when to declare that one hates, say, women, people of color, or members of the LGBTQA community would be completely unacceptable. Currently, there is little scholarship conducted, and there are virtually no university courses taught, on the topic of the rights of children. Compare this to the amount of scholarship that exists, and is encouraged, concerning sexism, racism, ableism, and LGBTQA discrimination. All of this, then, despite the fact that minors make up roughly 27% of the world’s population, despite all of us having once been children, despite our professed concern, love, and care for children. All of this is because children are, perhaps, the last group of oppressed human beings that we fail to recognize as oppressed. What is noteworthy about the oppression of young people compared to the oppression of other groups is how governments tend to position themselves in relation to the issue. Rather than denying children specific rights, the U.S. government, for instance, remains agnostic on most issues, preferring to give parents and guardians the legal right to decide what their children can and cannot do.

Phenomenology provides us with a method for critiquing the tools and technologies we use to power our cultures, support our cities, and maintain our state institutions. The environmental crisis that we currently have is inextricably tied to various political crises as well; and how we envision the tools, media, and material structures of our world are tied to these crises. Informed by an Husserlian conception of personhood and consciousness, an anarchic communitarian politics gives us a moral grounding for a critique of liberalism, capitalism, neoliberal democracy, the State, an assumed urban future, and the concept of “sustainability” as it relates to the existential threat of climate change and global warming. Thinking “outside the city” and “outside civilization,” we come to look to the anarchic communitarian leanings of Diogenes and indigenous peoples for a view of a future that does not sustain the status quo but instead radically re-envisions it.Phenomenology provides us with a method for critiquing the tools and technologies we use to power our cultures, support our cities, and maintain our state institutions. The environmental crisis that we currently have is inextricably tied to various political crises as well; and how we envision the tools, media, and material structures of our world are tied to these crises. Informed by an Husserlian conception of personhood and consciousness, an anarchic communitarian politics gives us a moral grounding for a critique of liberalism, capitalism, neoliberal democracy, the State, an assumed urban future, and the concept of “sustainability” as it relates to the existential threat of climate change and global warming. Thinking “outside the city” and “outside civilization,” we come to look to the anarchic communitarian leanings of Diogenes and indigenous peoples for a view of a future that does not sustain the status quo but instead radically re-envisions it.

The fate of al-Fārābī as a political philosopher is currently at stake. In the contemporary scholarship devoted to al-Fārābī, a debate has been waged for several decades between those scholars defending the legacy of Leo Strauss, namely Mushin Mahdi, Miriam Galston, and Charles Butterworth, who view al-Fārābī as a political philosopher par excellence by privileging his political texts as holding the esoteric key to deciphering his philosophy as a whole and scholars such as Dimitri Gutas and David Reisman who rebut Strauss by claiming that one cannot decisively distinguish between his political philosophy and other extant texts in his corpus. Instead of rehearsing their positions here, I wish to offer a new path forward by turning to al-Fārābī’s account of the imagination as a means to investigate the phenomenon of political community. This paper shall argue that al-Fārābī’s exposition of political community is primarily informed by a phenomenological naturalism adopted from Aristotle that is primarily oriented by how the human soul encounters phenomena by engaging with the surrounding world via the faculty of the imagination. In what follows, I shall briefly sketch the role of the imagination in Aristotle’s De Anima and Rhetoric before turning to al-Fārābī’s own phenomenology of the imagination in his political treatises ranging from the Attainment of Happiness (Taḥṣīl al-Sa‘āda) and Selected Aphorisms (Fuṣūl al-Muntaza‘a) to the Political Regime (Kitāb al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya) and the Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City (Mabādi’ Ārā’ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fāḍila).

In his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger points out that Aristotle's natural community is part and parcel of his more general attempt to account for the presencing (ousia) of things in nature (physis). That is, in order for things in nature to be they need to fulfill their definitions. Consequently, for humans, community is the place where humans as life-possessing-logos (zoōn logon ekhon) and at the same time life-in-the-polis (zoōn politikon) can reveal their genuine definition (horismos). This will render possible the first formulation of the community as a natural community. Yet, just like the status of abnormalities and accidents in nature, prioritizing the fulfillment of justice as laws of the society over the singular expression of individuals would eventually complicate the status of justice with regard to the abnormal and unprecedented cases. Derrida’s critique of the laws shed a good light on the limitation of all laws with a universal claim which will be applied here to the Aristotelian formulation of them. Finally, this essay highlights the moments that Aristotle’s admission of the impossibility of universal laws provides the possibility of alternative comportment towards otherness and alternative ethics. In effect, it is Aristotle's mistake or "missing the mark" (hamartia) that opens the door for a new mode of following the laws, I call nomadic following.

In this paper, my aim is to put into question Heideggerian versions of political ontology. In the first section of this article, I will discuss the main tenants of Heideggerian political ontology. I will then suggest that political ontologies indebted to Heidegger are based on a mistaken inference, which functions as an incorrect evidence for the political effectiveness of Heidegger’s concepts: the Heideggerians believe that the continuous changes which characterise ontic politics are an observable proof for the existence of a negative ontological foundation. My belief – which I will argue for in the second section of this paper – is that political phenomena do indeed appear as contingent (here I agree with the Heideggerians); however, this phenomenological fact does not necessitate the Heideggerian conclusion that ontic politics presupposes negative ontological foundations. Drawing on the phenomenological descriptions of Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, and Catherine Malabou, I will demonstrate that phenomena might simultaneously appear as contingent and as grounded in positive objects and processes. Phenomenology, therefore, provides resources to critique Heideggerian political ontology, and its conviction that ontic contingency is an evidence for the existence of negative foundations. I will conclude the paper by offering a sketch of an alternative, positive political ontology centered on the notion of antagonism, and the concomitant concept of political change.

This paper continues applying the notion of the “Luciferian Existential” as a way of accounting for the extreme violence humans seem to be willing to perpetrate both in nuclear war and in ignoring climate change. We begin by letting humankind and Lucifer mutually reflect what initially seems to be their distinguishing attributes. This is done as a speculative attempt to shed light on the seemingly impossible sin or crime of the greatest of all creatures in relation to God and, on the side of human beings, the unimaginable horror of the actualization of the preparation for nuclear war and continued ignoring of climate change. The hope is that we may illuminate human experience as it underwrites both horrors and how possibly human experience may illuminate the mythic-theological figure of Lucifer. Although we feature human kind’s essential being out of balance, its dodging of its mortality, and its ontological restlessness, culminating in blinding “Luciferian” rage as a way of understanding the human propensity to extreme violence, it is clear that neither the build-up of nuclear armaments nor ignoring climate change seem to be rooted in ontological restlessness or sort of blindness caused by suppression of death, or its capacity for rage or even jealousy, but in something else. Antiquity singled out pride or inordinate self-love as the perennial culprit. There is doubtless inordinate self-love in play here too, but here we suggest that it is also [inseparably the dulling of a sense of what is of ultimate importance, i.e., there is a loss of interest in what used to be called wisdom.

This contribution focuses on Heidegger’s critique of the vulgar nationalism contained in the Black Notebooks (1931-1938), and it follows the rejection of ideologisms that many of his works entail. According to Heidegger’s juridical reflection, “freedom is the ground of the inner possibility of correctness” with which external ideologies such as that of nationalism are avoided. This suggestion contrasts with Heidegger pro-Semitic orientation, testified by his rector’s speech in 1933, but is in line with the distance Heidegger sets between both the moral and the epistemological-ontological world, supported in his writings since the Marburg lectures (1923-1928). In the type of society, Heidegger figures out individuals live together in the πόλις by ek-sisting into the truth of being and by understanding the assignment of those directives that must become their laws and rules. These principles can’t be merely something fabricated by human reason, because they are a) the expression of social thinking made upon a juridical and normative framework close to liberalism. According to Heidegger, humanity is conceived to be free-in and able to choose the avoidance of totalitarian regimes voluntarily, as well as of eternal values supporting ideologies. With the freedom-in concept Heidegger b) solves the problem of coercive violence caused by the restriction of the ought to (i.e. the obligations that come from ideologies) towards the Being, to show the significance of ἦθος in which Dasein is placed. The choice to be in the ἦθος c) provides an explanation based on Heidegger’s critique of technology in his post-Turning writings. This critique clarifies why a national socialist ideology, making use of such technical instruments and supporting ethical materialism, is not in line with the political ontology Heidegger promotes in his writings.

In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to Athena on the Acropolis, opens a world rich with meaning and resonant with significance that orients the Athenian people within reality thus allowing their relations to others and to nature to appear as meaningful and ultimately nourishing. In other words, the Temple, like all great works of art, opens a world that is also a home. This article reviews the import of Heidegger’s reflection on monumental art, but we quickly turn to the principle objection to Heidegger’s thought, which is that the entire venture by which an artistic, religious, or poetic event organizes a world for “a people” is fundamentally illegitimate because of the way it binds individuals to an identity that outgroups the “foreigners” that do not belong to this identity and thus marginalizes them. This objection is a central motivating force for liberalism, and since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been almost hegemonic in many strands of philosophical thought and the globalized culture more widely. Thus, we see that the objection against Heidegger is primarily ethical and political and concerns not only his philosophy but the central and inter-related phenomenological ideas of the horizon, Lebenswelt, and the world—and thus the very relation of phenomenology itself—to contemporary ethical-political thinking. But because the objections are so strongly rooted in motivations, our phenomenological inquiry into the ‘world’ will have to be supplemented by recourse to hermeneutics.

The notion of 'freedom' has gained an emblematic character in contemporary political discourse. It is, commonly, viewed as the central value and political goal of modern societies. Similarly, human rights documents conceive of freedom as their founding principle with universal validity. In contradistinction to this prevalent approach to freedom, this paper aims to demonstrate that freedom is, primarily, a political signifier with social-historical variability. One cannot, therefore, simply and uncritically assume that freedom has (or should have) universal validity or transhistorical significance. In the first section of this paper, the structure of the contemporary liberal discourse on freedom is discussed and called into question. In light of Arendt's interpretation of freedom and through her analysis of the public domain, I reflect on the social-historical variability of the meaning of freedom and its inextricable nexus with a particular form of society. In the second section and drawing on Castoriadis, the notion of 'freedom' is approached in view of human signifying practices and the imaginary dimensions of society. This examination reveals in what way freedom––in the sense of a central social imaginary signification––contributes to the institution of an autonomous mode of society and determines the affective disposition and intentional vector of its inhabitants.