Reza Davari Ardakani, Martin Heidegger and the Crisis of Modernity II
Reza Davari Ardakani was born in Ardakan, in central Iran, in 1933. He belongs to a generation of Iranian philosophers specialists of Ahmad Fardid and Martin Heidegger. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, and president of the Iranian Academy of Sciences from 1998 to 2023,
From Ardakan to Tehran
Davari’s intellectual formation was unusually broad. After completing his early education, he worked as a schoolteacher before entering the University of Tehran in the 1950s. He studied philosophy there and eventually completed his doctorate in 1967. His dissertation examined the practical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and its influence on the political philosophy of Al-Farabi.
This early interest in Greek philosophy and Farabi would remain important throughout his career. Davari never regarded Islamic philosophy as a museum of historical doctrines. Rather, he became interested in the question of how philosophical thinking emerges within a civilization and how it responds to the historical conditions of that civilization.
His later work would therefore move constantly between Plato, Aristotle, Farabi, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the intellectual problems of contemporary Iran.
He also encountered the Iranian intellectual tradition surrounding Ahmad Fardid, one of the earliest and most influential interpreters of Heidegger in Iran. Fardid’s importance was not simply that he introduced a German philosopher to Iranian readers. He attempted to use Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics to interpret Iran’s own encounter with modernity.
Davari inherited this problem and transformed it into a much more systematic philosophical project.
Heidegger and the question of the West
The central concept in Davari’s thought is the West.
But when Davari speaks of “the West,” he does not merely mean Europe or North America. His use of the term is philosophical and historical. The West represents a particular form of civilization, one whose development culminates in modern science, technology, rationalism, humanism and the increasing domination of the world by the human subject.
This interpretation owes much to Heidegger.
For Heidegger, modernity was not simply a period characterized by industrialization or political liberalism. It represented a stage in the history of Western metaphysics in which beings increasingly appear as objects available for calculation, representation and control.
Davari brings this diagnosis into the Iranian context.
His question is therefore not whether Iran should accept or reject a particular Western political model. It is whether the philosophical assumptions underlying modern civilization can simply be transplanted into a society whose historical experience is fundamentally different.
This distinction is essential to understanding Davari. His critique of the West is not primarily a geopolitical critique. It is a critique of a particular conception of humanity.
The modern individual imagines himself to be autonomous, rational and capable of mastering the world through knowledge. Modern science and technology appear as the instruments through which this mastery becomes possible. Yet Davari argues that this apparent triumph conceals a deeper crisis: the more human beings transform the world into an object of knowledge and production, the more they risk forgetting the question of Being itself.
Fardid and the Iranian Heidegger
Davari’s relationship with Ahmad Fardid is consequently decisive.
Fardid interpreted Heidegger through the Iranian experience and became associated with the concept of gharbzadegi, generally translated as “Westoxication,” “Occidentosis” or “West infection.” The concept was later popularized by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, although its philosophical genealogy was closely associated with Fardid’s Heideggerian interpretation.
Encyclopaedia Iranica describes Fardid and Davari as central figures in the development of a specifically Iranian form of Heideggerian thought after the Revolution.
For Fardid, Westernization was not simply the adoption of foreign products, institutions or customs. It represented a deeper transformation of consciousness. The danger was that Iran could lose contact with its own spiritual and historical identity by accepting Western modernity as a universal model.
Davari developed this concern in a more academic and philosophical language.
His work did not simply argue that everything Western was bad and everything Iranian was good. The issue was more complicated. Science, technology, political institutions and modern culture could not be understood independently of the historical world that produced them.
The question therefore became: can Iran become modern without becoming Western?
For Davari, the answer could not be obtained through slogans. It required philosophy.
Modernity as a historical destiny
One of the most distinctive aspects of Davari’s philosophy is his insistence that modernity cannot simply be chosen or rejected at will.
Modernity is a historical world.
This makes his position more complex than ordinary anti-Westernism. The modern world has transformed the conditions of human existence so profoundly that no society can simply return to a premodern past.
Science has transformed knowledge. Technology has transformed work and everyday life. Modern institutions have transformed politics. Urbanization and industrialization have transformed social relationships.
The problem is therefore not how to escape modernity physically. It is how to understand the historical situation in which humanity finds itself.
Davari’s writings on Western civilization, science and contemporary philosophy repeatedly return to this problem. Scholars have described his approach as a critique of modernism drawing simultaneously on Heideggerian philosophy and Islamic-Shiite intellectual resources.
This is why his thought is better understood as a philosophy of historical consciousness than as a simple ideology of rejection.
Philosophy against ideology
Davari has also repeatedly defended philosophy against its reduction to political ideology.
This point is particularly important because of the political uses to which Heideggerian ideas were put in post-revolutionary Iran. Critics have associated Davari with the intellectual foundations of conservative and anti-modernist currents within the Islamic Republic. Academic literature has placed him at one pole of the major Iranian debates about modernity, opposite reformist thinkers such as Abdolkarim Soroush.
Yet Davari himself has resisted the idea that philosophy should simply serve political power.
For him, philosophy begins with questioning. Its purpose is not to provide ready-made political answers but to expose the assumptions beneath them.
This is particularly evident in his writings on the relationship between philosophy and ideology. The danger of ideology, in his view, is precisely that it closes the space of questioning. Once a political doctrine claims to possess the final explanation of history, philosophy becomes unnecessary.
This concern creates an important tension within Davari’s own intellectual biography. He became a major figure within the institutions of the Islamic Republic while simultaneously insisting that philosophical thought cannot be reduced to political utility.
That tension is one reason why his work remains difficult to classify.
Davari and Abdolkarim Soroush
Few intellectual relationships better illustrate the philosophical divisions of post-revolutionary Iran than the contrast between Davari and Abdolkarim Soroush.
Both thinkers were deeply engaged with the question of modernity, religion and the West. But their approaches diverged sharply.
Soroush sought to reconcile religious thought with modern epistemology. His approach emphasized the historical character of human knowledge and opened a path toward religious reform and intellectual pluralism.
Davari was much more suspicious of the philosophical foundations of modernity itself.
Where Soroush tended to ask how religious thought could respond to modern knowledge, Davari asked whether modern knowledge had itself become part of a broader historical crisis.
The disagreement was therefore not simply political. At its deepest level, it concerned the meaning of reason.
Is modern rationality a universal achievement that religious thought must learn to accommodate? Or is modern rationality itself historically situated, with its own metaphysical assumptions and limitations?
Davari belongs firmly to the second camp.
Science, technology and underdevelopment
Another major theme in Davari’s thought is the question of science and development.
For decades, Iran’s political and intellectual debates have often assumed that the solution to underdevelopment is straightforward: acquire more science, technology, industrial capacity and modern institutions.
Davari challenges the simplicity of this formula.
He does not deny the importance of science. Rather, he questions the assumption that science can be detached from the civilization in which it emerged.
A country can import machines without necessarily acquiring the historical conditions that produced modern science. It can build universities without automatically creating a scientific culture. It can acquire technology without resolving the philosophical and social questions surrounding its use.
This is why Davari’s reflections on underdevelopment are ultimately reflections on civilization.
The problem is not merely that some countries possess less technology than others. It is that certain societies have become consumers of a civilization whose intellectual foundations they have not fully appropriated.
The solution, therefore, cannot be imitation.
Farabi and the possibility of another civilization
Davari’s return to Al-Farabi is particularly significant in this context.
Farabi represents for him evidence that Islamic civilization was once capable of appropriating Greek philosophy creatively rather than mechanically.
The Islamic philosophers did not merely reproduce Plato and Aristotle. They translated, transformed and incorporated Greek philosophy into a new intellectual world.
Davari sees this historical experience as potentially instructive for the contemporary encounter with the West.
Iran does not have to choose between isolation and imitation.
There may be another possibility: genuine intellectual appropriation.
Such appropriation requires understanding the West philosophically rather than simply admiring or condemning it. It also requires understanding one’s own tradition not as a collection of nostalgic symbols but as a living source of thought.
This is perhaps the most constructive dimension of Davari’s philosophy.
Beyond anti-Westernism
Davari is often described simply as an anti-Western philosopher. The description is not entirely wrong, but it is insufficient.
His deeper concern is the crisis of modern civilization.
He is interested in what happens when technological rationality becomes the dominant mode of understanding reality, when human beings increasingly define themselves through production and consumption, and when philosophical questioning is replaced by technical problem-solving.
In this respect, Davari’s critique can be read alongside Heidegger’s analysis of technology, Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism and the broader twentieth-century critique of modernity.
His Iranian perspective adds another dimension: the question of what happens when a non-Western civilization encounters a modernity that presents itself as universal.
Iran’s dilemma then becomes a philosophical dilemma shared by much of the non-Western world.
How can a civilization participate in modernity without simply dissolving its historical identity?
Conclusion
Reza Davari Ardakani’s dialogue with Heidegger becomes decisive when his fundamental question is not simply whether Iran should become modern. Iran has already entered the modern world. The question is whether it can think its way through modernity.
“I am a professor of philosophy. I want to read Aristotle, Bergson, and Lyotard. […] If you are looking for a ‘hygienic’ philosophy, then do not do philosophy. Philosophy is pain, ordeal, and revolt.” (Interview with Reza Davari Ardakani, “The Philosopher Is Free from All Ideologies,” published by 3DANET.)