Siavash Jamadi, Martin Heidegger and the Crisis of Modernity IX
Every intellectual tradition has its gatekeepers, the people who decide in what words a foreign thought will enter the house. In Iran, for half a century, one of the most consequential of them has been a man who never wished to be only a translator. Siavash Jamadi is the translator of Being and Time into Persian from the German. He is also the author of a thousand-page history of phenomenology and of a sustained, uncomfortable inquiry into what Heidegger’s philosophy does to the people who live by it. In a series devoted to the crisis of modernity as it is lived and argued in Iranian thought, he deserves a place. His case shows what happens when the person who carries a dangerous thinker into a language is also the person who reads him most severely. (Editor’s note: the translator discussed here is not Siavash Jamshidi Kheirabadi, arrested during the January 2026 protests in Shahrekord and executed on 3 October 2026, for moharebeh, “enmity against God”, over accusations that he fired at security forces on 8 January.)
A lawyer among the phenomenologists
Jamadi was born in Tehran in Bahman 1330, early 1952 in the Gregorian calendar. His path to philosophy was not a straight line. He first studied law at the University of Tehran, graduating in 1353 (1974), then took a master’s degree in Western philosophy at Allameh Tabataba’i University and a second master’s in English literature at Islamic Azad University.
The Iran in which he came to philosophy was the Iran of Ahmad Fardid and of the long Heideggerian wave that fed the discourse of “Westoxification”. Heidegger had arrived in Persian well before he was translated, through the oral teaching of Fardid, through Reza Davari Ardakani and through the essays of Daryush Shayegan. The Heidegger most Iranians knew was a prophet of the end of the West, a thinker who promised to show that modernity was a forgetting of Being. Much of the Persian reception was thus an act of faith before it was an act of reading. A translator who set out to give readers the actual sentences of Sein und Zeit was doing something quietly subversive. He was replacing a rumour with a text.
Translating the unreadable
Jamadi is described as the first translator of Being and Time, and of several other major Heidegger works, from German into Persian. Anyone who has tried to turn Heidegger into any language knows the difficulty. German philosophical prose allows a creative etymology that English and French lack. Persian offers the translator a different resource, a double lexicon in which Arabic-derived terms of the old philosophy and native Persian roots compete for every concept. Each choice carries a theology or a politics. To render Dasein, Lichtung or Gelassenheit in Persian is to decide how much of the Islamic philosophical tradition one wants to let back in, and how much one wants to resist. On one side stand those who want to build philosophical vocabulary from pure Persian roots, the purist current. On the other stand those who rely on the traditional Arabo-Islamic philosophical terminology. Morad Farhadpour argued since the Constitutional Revolution, translation is “the only true form of thought for us”.
The result has not always been easy to read, and Jamadi’s critics have said so. One commentator observed that the Persian Heidegger remains hard going even with the help of Arabic vocabulary, and that this holds even for a translator whose effort and perseverance are visible in every line of Being and Time. The remark is more generous than it sounds. It points the difficulty at Heidegger rather than at his translator, and the Persian text may be as hard as the German because it has stayed faithful to it.
What the translator chose to bring over is as revealing as how he did it. His last Heidegger translation was the lecture course published as What Is Called Thinking?, a text that stresses Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. He did not stop at Heidegger, either. He also translated Miguel de Beistegui’s Heidegger and the Political and Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity. The last pairing is remarkable. Jamadi put into Persian both the thinker and one of his fiercest German critics, the man who accused Heideggerian language of dressing up its emptiness as depth. The same translator offered Iranian readers the poison and an analysis of how it works.
A history of phenomenology, and a chapter on action
His major original work is Zamineh va Zamaneh-ye Padidarshenasi, which could be rendered as “The Context and the Era of Phenomenology”. The book runs to 1,018 pages and first appeared in 2006. It follows the historical, cultural and biographical origins of phenomenology back to Franz Brentano and even to medieval Christian and Islamic thought, and places the phenomenologists within the philosophical conflicts and aims of European intellectuals. It is a book of contexts. It refuses the idea that a philosophy descends from the sky and insists on asking who these men were, whom they read, whom they feared and what they wanted.
Its treatment of Heidegger is the point of interest here. A footnoted discussion of the book cites a late chapter titled “Heidegger and the Problem of Action: From Nazism to Gelassenheit”, running across the pages from roughly 748 to 774. The title carries a whole interpretation. It sketches a path from engagement with the regime of 1933 to the later renunciation of will, the “releasement” of the later thought. That arc is the one many Heideggerians prefer, the story of a thinker who erred politically and then purified himself. Jamadi’s treatment is more ambivalent. The problem of action is for him a standing problem of Heidegger’s philosophy, and he does not treat it as an episode to be closed.
Beyond phenomenology, he has also published Siri dar Jahan-e Kafka, a study of Kafka’s world, and a book on Heidegger and politics. The mixture says something. Kafka is the novelist of the machinery that crushes the individual without ever showing a face, and Jamadi’s attention to him sits oddly well with his attention to a philosopher who thought the modern age was ruled by the impersonal.
After the Black Notebooks
The test of any Heidegger scholar came in 2014, when the first volumes of the Black Notebooks appeared in Germany. These private notebooks, written from 1931 onward, contain passages on “world Jewry” that shocked even sympathetic readers, and they reopened the old question of whether the philosophy was compatible with the politics. Jamadi gave Farhang-e Emrooz a conversation on Heidegger and National Socialism after the notebooks’ publication, in November 2014, and it ran far longer than that single subject.
His conclusion, as the magazine presented it, is not the defensive one. He said his studies had led him to see that every philosophy, however much it presents itself as thinking for its own sake, carries within it an expectation about action. In the portrait that magazine draws of him, Heidegger holds his principles with great rigour and treats human sympathy, in its humanist form above all, as something to be sacrificed to the history of Being. The last point is a direct and serious indictment. Compassion, on this reading, is not an accident that the philosopher forgot. It is what his system consciously gives up.
Around the same period he spoke to Farhikhtegan in the same spirit. He said that Heidegger was particularly attached to the Nazis and defended them in his lectures, and that the philosophy is a harsh one whose interpretation is complex and dark, yet supported by serious intellectual foundations. He did not therefore conclude that the philosophy should be dismissed. He argued that it is not a weak edifice, because it takes shape in a field of conflict among the strongest intellectual forces and shapes the philosophers who follow. This is the difficult position, and it is the one I find most instructive. Heidegger is dangerous because he is strong.
A passage in an interview published by the Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia suggests where Jamadi’s reading leads, though I would not press it too far. There he seems to say he takes his leave of Heidegger, since Heidegger himself at one moment sought to turn Being into something separate, fixed and commanding. If that is his meaning, the farewell is made in the name of one of Heidegger’s own ideas. It is a philosopher’s break with a thinker who betrayed his own best insight.
Faye, and the Persian quarrel
Where does Emmanuel Faye enter? His book on the introduction of Nazism into philosophy is the best-known French case against Heidegger. It was published in French in 2005 and reached English readers through Yale University Press in 2009. It rests on the unpublished seminars of 1933 to 1935. Its thesis is that Heidegger’s work is not an innocent philosophy that happened to touch politics. It brought the principles of Nazism into the heart of philosophy.
In Iran the argument arrived by an indirect route. In the spring of 2014 a report in the newspaper Ayandegan described the new controversies around Heidegger. The translator Yadollah Mowaghen was citing Faye, who in his view sees Heidegger’s philosophy as the philosophical expression of Nazism from beginning to end. Jamadi appears in that same report, but as a separate voice. As far as I can tell, he does not answer Faye there, and I have found no text in which the two are set directly against each other. I can see the same material reaching the two men from different directions, and their conclusions differ.
Faye’s position is that the philosophy is the problem. Mowaghen’s is that the philosophy is worthless. Jamadi’s is more troubling than either. He agrees that the involvement was deep and that the system lends itself to the politics, and he still holds that the system is a serious one that cannot be waved away. An issue of Farhang-e Emrooz also gave space to Faye, presenting him as one of the strongest voices insisting on Heidegger’s Nazism. That the same magazine hosted both Faye and Jamadi shows how open the Persian debate has been. Few readers of Heidegger in the West have had to translate him while the argument raged around them.
Conclusion
In a 2018 interview with Asr-e Iran after Daryush Shayegan’s death, he took up the question of whether Shayegan was a philosopher, and replied that Iranian history has not, in the proper sense, produced philosophers and thinkers. Shayegan, was a student of Henry Corbin who moved in Ahmad Fardid’s intellectual orbit. Jamadi gave Persian its first sustained Heidegger and, at the same time, the tools to resist him. The Adorno beside the Heidegger on the shelf is the symbol of that double gesture.