Ahmad Fardid
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Ahmad Fardid (b.1939 Yazd-d.1994 Tehran) was a controversial atheist Iranian philosopher and an inspiring and dedicated professor of Tehran University. He was under the influence of Martin Heidegger, the influential German philosopher.
Fardid studied philosophy at Tehran University, Sorbonne university and University of Heidelberg. The sparsity of Fardid’s written work has led to his recognition as an "oral philosopher". This was, to be sure a puzzling attribute. Although Fardid tried to justify his expository reluctance to the poverty and contamination of the language, (in the Heideggerian sense) some suspect his reticence stemmed from his paralyzing perfectionism. His predicament calls resemblance to Efimov, a character in Dostoyevsky's unfinished novel "Netochka Nezvanova" in which the protagonist, a violin performer, having had a brush with the sublime majesty of pure art abandons his musical instrument for good.
Fardid coined the concept of "Westoxication" which was then popularized by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad.
Fardid's turbulent intellect was absorbed in the enterprise of synthesizing (promisingly or otherwise) the results of his studies of Eastern civilizations with the Western philosophy, as interpreted by Heidegger. Fardid's project remains unfinished and fraught with shortcomings and errors. Nevertheless, it remains an enormously intriguing and valuable endeavor. Heidegger himself on several occasions (including in his encounters with DT Suzuki concerning "transmetaphysical thinking" and in his valedictory interview with Der Spiegel) optimistically alluded to the possibility of a convergence of Eastern and Western thought but he never explored the subject matter himself, citing a lack of knowledge and insight about the non-Western universe of discourse. Ahmad Fardid, from his corner, hoped to produce a blueprint for the endeavor, but he only succeeded in vaguely adumbrating certain contours of it.
[edit] Criticisms
Ahmad Fardid has been widely criticised by Abdolkarim Soroush and Dariush Ashuri as being against human rights. Fardid once said that "human rights" is a bourgeois trick against workers and the deprived. Fardid regularly told his pupils that everything said and written about justice, democracy, freedom and patience was a bunch of lies. Fardid was also an advocate of conspiracy theory.
