IRAN FROM HEIDEGGER TO KANT

NOW FREE: Iran is now de facto fighting not just for its own sovereignty, but for the global principle of sovereignty

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After March 1, 2026, I was bombarded by media to say something on the ongoing attack of the US and Israel on Iran. Some of them recalled that on August 11, 2005 I published in In These Times a text “Give Iranian Nukes a Chance: In a mad world, the logic of MAD still works”, asking me if this is still my position. I have to disappoint them in two ways: first, no, this is not my position now – in my text, I referred to the Western complicity with the Iraqi attack on Iran (the US even provided satellite images and poisonous gases to Iraq to spot and kill Iranian forces). The attack was done so that, in the confusion after the Khomeini revolution, Iraq would grab the oil-rich terrain close to the Iranian border. When Saddam Hussein was captured and put to trial, Iran quite reasonably demanded to add to the list of his crimes also the attack on Iran, which cost more than a million casualties; the US rejected this demand because it would bring to light the US’s complicity with Iraq.

However, what happened in Iran in 2022 – the so-called Mahsa Amini protests – had a world-historical significance. The protests, which spread to dozens of cities, began in Tehran on 16 September 2022, as a reaction to the death of Amini, a 22-year-old woman of Kurdish origins who died in police custody. She was beaten to death by the Guidance Patrol, known as the Islamic ‘morality police’, after being arrested for wearing an ‘improper’ hijab. The protests combined different struggles (against women’s oppression, against religious oppression, for political freedom against state terror) into an organic union. Iran is culturally different from the ‘developed West’, so Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (’Woman, Life, Freedom’, the slogan of the protests) is very different from the ‘Me Too’ movement in Western countries.

Iran’s protests mobilized millions of ordinary women, and were directly linked to the struggle of all, men included – there is no apparent anti-male tendency, as is often the case with Western feminism. My position towards Iran has now changed: no nuclear arms for Iran (and, I would add, also for Israel…) – so I agree with Ali Khamenei, who back in the mid-1990s proclaimed a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons. True, hardliners opposed this stance, and in March 2025 a Khamenei advisor, Ali Larijani, said Iran would have no choice but to develop nuclear weapons if attacked by the United States or its allies¹ – but who can really blame him for that?

As for the ongoing war, there is nothing original in my stance: I am against the Iranian clerofascist regime, AND against the US and Israeli attacks – if this regime falls, it will be in a wrong way. The choice between the Iranian regime and the Trumpian US is a false one; they both belong to the same global world. Yes, I condemn the Iranian atrocities in suppressing the last wave of protests, but I also find obscene the stance adopted on March 4, 2026 by the Israeli defence minister Israel Katz:

“Every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime to continue and lead the plan to destroy Israel, to threaten the United States and the free world and the countries of the region, and to suppress the Iranian people – will be an unequivocal target for elimination. It does not matter what his name is or the place where he hides.”²

So one can well understand the silent majority in Iran (silenced by the regime), which rejects the regime but is also sceptical of what the US and Israel are doing – their stance is neither hope nor despair but uncertainty and fear. As in the case of Venezuela, Trump told CNN on March 6, 2026 that Iran’s leadership has been “neutered” and that he’s looking for new leadership that will treat the United States and Israel well, even if that’s a religious leader and it’s not a democratic state...³ – so much for freedom and democracy.

Consequently, in spite of all the horrors of the Iranian regime (it is almost as oppressive as that of Saudi Arabia...), we have now to support Iran. Iran is now de facto fighting not just for its own sovereignty, but for the global principle of sovereignty. The saddest thing here is the role of Western Europe which, with the honourable exception of Spain, again missed the opportunity and behaved like a servant of the US. The US, itself a de facto colony of Israel, serially violates the sovereignty of other countries, now even of Spain. So yes, a regime change would be welcome in Iran – but what about a regime change in the US itself?

At this moment, I want to focus on an apparently marginal topic which is nonetheless crucial for our understanding of Iran. The Iranian inner circle maintains an incredibly high level of intellectual debate – not just corrupted brutalists. Khamenei himself wrote books on Islamic ideology, governance, and private spiritual life, among them An Outline of Islamic Thought in the Quran and The Compassionate Family. Until the mid-1990s, the key person was Seyyed Ahmad Fardid (1910–1994), a prominent philosopher and a professor at Tehran University. He is considered to be among the philosophical ideologues of the Islamic government of Iran which came to power in 1979, following the revolution. Fardid was under the influence of Martin Heidegger, whom he considered “the only Western philosopher who understood the world and the only philosopher whose insights were congruent with the principles of the Islamic Republic. These two figures, Khomeini and Heidegger, helped Fardid argue his position.”

Fardid decried the anthropocentrism and rationalism brought by classical Greece, replacing the authority of God and faith with human reason, and in that regard he also criticized Islamic philosophers like al-Farabi and Mulla Sadra for having absorbed Greek philosophy. Fardid coined the concept of “Westoxication,” which, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, became one of the core ideological teachings of the new Islamic government of Iran.⁴

The main liberal-reformist opponent to this Muslim hard line was the president Mohammad Khatami, who received a BA in Western philosophy at Isfahan University. He served from 1997 to 2005. Khatami had run on a platform of liberalization and reform. During his election campaign, Khatami proposed the idea of Dialogue Among Civilizations as a response to Samuel P. Huntington’s 1992 theory of a Clash of Civilizations. The United Nations later proclaimed the year 2001 as the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations, on Khatami’s suggestion. During his two terms as president, Khatami advocated freedom of expression, tolerance and civil society, and constructive diplomatic relations with other states, including those in Asia and the European Union. The Iranian media are forbidden, on the orders of Tehran’s prosecutor, from publishing pictures of Khatami or quoting his words, on account of his support for the defeated reformist candidates in the disputed 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.⁵

Khatami utilized Jürgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action and dialogue to propose the “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” aiming to replace conflict with discourse between the West and the Islamic world. Habermas visited Tehran in May 2002, marking a significant intellectual exchange during Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency. The visit included meetings with Iranian intellectuals and officials, where Habermas discussed democracy, civil society, and the role of theory, often engaging with figures who sought to reconcile Islamic thought with modern, liberal concepts. However, not least due to hard-line Muslim repression, this orientation disappeared as a serious intellectual force. Among the more recent tendencies, one should mention Ali Larijani, who was for decades the calm, pragmatic face of the Iranian establishment – he negotiated nuclear deals with the West. But on March 1, the 67-year-old secretary of the Supreme National Security Council’s tone changed irrevocably. Appearing on state television just 24 hours after US-Israeli air strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Mohammad Pakpour, Larijani delivered a message of fire:

“America and the Zionist regime [Israel] have set the heart of the Iranian nation ablaze. We will burn their hearts. We will make the Zionist criminals and the shameless Americans regret their actions.”

Politically, Larijani was a moderate pragmatist conservative who headed the Iranian team in negotiations on the nuclear programme with the US. Now he has emerged as a hard-liner. Following the assassination of Khamenei, he has been regarded as the de facto head of state of Iran. According to The New York Times, Ali Larijani has effectively been running Iran since January 2026. He was in “charge of crushing, with lethal force, the recent protests demanding the end of Islamic rule.”⁶ He is now the key power broker in Iran’s transition. However, days ago he lost in the race for the supreme post: Khamenei’s son won.

Larijani holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and mathematics from Aryamehr University of Technology and holds a master’s degree and PhD in Western philosophy from the University of Tehran. Initially, he wanted to continue his graduate studies in computer science, but changed his subject after consultation with Morteza Motahhari. Larijani has published books on Immanuel Kant, Saul Kripke, and David Lewis. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Kant and followed that with these three published books: The Mathematical Method in Kant’s Philosophy, Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences in Kant’s Philosophy, and Intuition and the Synthetic A Priori Judgments in Kant’s Philosophy. (One should note that Larijani wrote books on the scientific-cognitive aspects of Kant’s thought, not on his practical philosophy.) Stephen Hicks, a liberal anti-postmodernist, wrote apropos Larijani: “I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised that these guys are never students of John Locke, Adam Smith, or John Stuart Mill.”⁷ But was he right in his surmise that Kant’s practical thought can justify extreme authoritarianism?

In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of the twist that Nazi executioners accomplished in order to be able to endure the horrible acts they performed. Most of them were not simply evil; they were well aware that they were doing things which brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that, “instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!” the murderers would be able to say: “What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: the temptation to be resisted was the very temptation to succumb to the elementary pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, and their “ethical” effort was directed towards the task of resisting the temptation NOT to murder, torture and humiliate. My very violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and compassion is thus turned into proof of my ethical grandeur: to do my duty, I am ready to assume the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others.

However, Hannah Arendt was wrong when she accepted Eichmann’s self-characterization as a Kantian who just followed the categorical imperative and defined his duty as obeying Hitler’s orders. One should be very precise here: the Kantian ethics of autonomy of the will is not a “cognitive” ethics, an ethics of recognizing and following the moral Law which is already given. According to the standard critique, the limitation of the Kantian universalist ethic of the “categorical imperative” (the unconditional injunction to do our duty) resides in its formal indeterminacy: the moral Law does not tell me what my duty is; it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves the space open for empty voluntarism (whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty).

Far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself – which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of translating the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: “I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do – this is my duty...” Kant’s ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude – no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Führer’s orders. However, the aim of Kant’s emphasis on the subject’s full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such manoeuvre of putting the blame onto some figure of the big Other.

The standard motto of ethical rigour is: “There is no excuse for not accomplishing one’s duty!” Although Kant’s well-known maxim Du kannst, denn du sollst! (”You can, because you must!”) seems to offer a new version of this motto, he implicitly complements it with its much more uncanny inversion: “There is no excuse for accomplishing one’s duty!” The very reference to duty as an excuse to do my duty should be rejected as hypocritical. Recall the proverbial example of a severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture; his excuse to himself (and to others) is: “I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do – it’s my duty!” This is what Kantian ethics thoroughly forbids: in it, I am fully responsible not only for doing my duty but also for determining what my duty is. So Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, was right when he recently said that Kant, who spent his entire life in the region of Kaliningrad (German Königsberg), has a “direct connection” to the war in Ukraine. According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy, whose “godlessness and lack of higher values” began with Kant, that created the “sociocultural situation” that led, among other things, to the First World War:

“Today, in 2024, we’re bold enough to assert that not only did the First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the current conflict in Ukraine. Here in Kaliningrad, we dare to propose — although we’re actually almost certain of it — that it was precisely in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals […] that the ethical, value-based foundations of the current conflict were established.”⁸

The governor went on to call Kant one of the “spiritual creators of the modern West,” saying that the “Western bloc, which was shaped by the US in its own image,” is an “empire of lies.” Kant, he said, is referred to as the “father of almost everything” in the West, including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism, and “even the idea of the European Union.” And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russia. Alikhanov’s “crazy” statements are thus a useful reminder of the high metaphysical stakes of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Alikhanov is also right in another sense: Kant brutally dispelled the myth of the sacred origins of the rule of law; he made it clear that the origin of every legal order is illegal violence – a lesson unacceptable for the Russian spiritualism advocated by Alikhanov. One cannot but quote here a remark misattributed to Otto von Bismarck: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”⁹

This incompatibility of Kant’s ethics with limiting the subject’s autonomy is, I presume, what makes any kind of Kantian religious ethics inconsistent. So what seems to be missing in Iranian thought close to the regime is not Western liberalism but the subject’s radical autonomy which, in contrast to what we would expect, grounds a very strict and severe ethics. However, the fact remains that intense and very serious intellectual debates are constantly taking place in the very centre of the Iranian Shia elite which holds power – can one even imagine Larijani, if he were to be elected supreme leader, debating with Trump, who would have no idea whatsoever about what Larijani is talking about? I leave it to my readers to decide if the high intellectual level of debates in the Iranian leadership is a good thing or a bad thing, i.e., something that makes the turn towards brutal authoritarianism easier. The case of Alikhanov criticizing Kant would be an argument against allowing politicians to debate philosophy – but how would a debate between Larijani and Alikhanov look? The sad conclusion we can draw from this situation is that the Israel-US attack changed moderates of the regime like Larijani into murderous fanatics, almost as bad as Netanyahu and Katz.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against_nuclear_weapons#cite_note-forein_policy-2.

2. https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/israel-katz-iran/2026/03/04/id/1248261/?ns_mail_uid=d3eb84e7-3327-44fa-afd8-06c52f8c6f61&ns_mail_job=DM930194_03042026&s=acs&dkt_nbr=010124wpf87o.

3. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/06/politics/trump-interview-iran-cuba-dana-bash.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Fardid.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Khatami.

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Larijani.

7. https://www.stephenhicks.org/2026/03/02/irans-transition-power-broker-ali-larijani-is-a-kant-scholar/.

8. Governor of Russia’s Kaliningrad says German philosopher Immanuel Kant ‘directly tied’ to war in Ukraine — Meduza.

9. I owe this reference to Yuval Kremnitzer.