Symptom of Philosophy

The Iranian intellectual, Ramin Jahanbegloo has been arrested recently in Iran. I knew his writing through articles and interviews with/by him that I read here and there during the last decade. I have also met him once or twice back home in Tehran. I think I was about eighteen or nineteen when I first met him. We were bunch of kids who have read couple of philosophical texts here and there without any academic methods and mostly of poorly translated book. We realized that what we were reading is not going to do us any good since it was totally chaotic and confusing. So we decided to get hold of someone who could tell us what to read and how to read. Ramin Jahanbegloo had just returned to Iran and was becoming a known name among book readers. I got Jahanbegloo’s phone number through Bijan Jalali (the nephew of the prominent Iranian novelist, Sadegh Hedayat) and called him, asking if he would help us with our problem. He invited me to his home and there I asked my questions and he told me we should begin our readings with Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences which was included in a book Seir-e Hekmat dar Oroopa (that is the first proper history of Western philosophy write in Persian.) But he emphasizes that we should first read the Descartes’ and then the rest of the book. From there on, he believed, we would find our way through our questions.

When I heard that Jahanbegloo has been arrested it did not make any sense to me. Why do they arrest him? Why now? What is the real scheme? What does it signify in the general picture, bearing in mind the crises Iran is facing? It also reminded me that I have but read very little of Jahanbegloo’s writings. So I just got hold of Jahanbegloo's Conversation with Isaiah Berlin and am reading it now (thanks to the Islamic Republic of Iran!) There was a phrase which came all ironic concerning the situation Jahanbegloo is trapped in. Isaiah Berlins said to Jahanbegloo, “Not to know where to look for answer is the surest symptom of a philosophical problem.” Does Islamic republic bear this symptom; because they can’t find “the answer” to the problem therefore they just go around arrest people? Does Iran suffer from the same disease? Is it not the symptom which we Iranians all share no matter where we live and what we do?
As far as I know, Ramin Jahanbegloo’s answer would be “hell, yes!” Through his career he has been and still is (and hopefully will after getting out of that medieval prison be) telling us that our real problem is that of philosophy, of thought.