Daryush Shayegan is one of Iran’s leading thinkers and scholars of cultural anthropology and Indian studies. He was born in 1935 in Tabriz to a Shiite father and a Georgian Sunni mother. He is one of the most important thinkers of modern Iran. He was a professor of Indian Religions and Sanskrit Studies at the University of Tehran. Shayegan spent his teenage years in boarding school in Great Britain, lived in Geneva during his youth and studied French literature and philosophy, Sanskrit and political science at the Université de Genève. Shayegan received his doctorate at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Dr. Henry Corbin, with a thesis entitled “Les Relations de l’hindouisme et du soufisme d’après le Majma’ al-Bahrayn”. Daryush Shayegan has been interested in culture, art and literature from his teenage years and has always been keen to delve deep, not superficially, into theater, painting, sculpture, architecture and many other subjects. Daryush has always been very interested in mystical poetry, including Edgar Allan Poe.
Shayegan has written many pioneering works on the epistemological specificities of eastern and western cultures and the possibility of dialog between them. He is the founding director of the Iranian Center for the Study of Civilizations, which launched its work in 1977 with an international symposium on “dialogue between civilizations”, a concept embraced by former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. In 2009, Shayegan was awarded the Global Dialogue Prize. The period of Daryush Shayegan’s life in Geneva should be considered the period of his character formation; many people – and perhaps himself – might think that his personality was most influenced by his work in Paris. Most of Daryush’s major studies and research took place in Geneva. Even after he received his PhD in Paris and returned to Iran, he internalized what he had learned, and in fact his main theorizing period began after the revolution. In 1989, Shayegan published Le Regard Mutilé: Schizophrénie Culturelle (Schizophrénie Culturelle) in 1989, he draws attention to the confusion of Eastern societies in their view of modern society.
Shayegan, who refers to the situation of Eastern societies as “cultural schizophrenia”, defines this concept as follows: “It is the state of having a contradictory, crippled consciousness and point of view caused by two opposite emotions such as admiration and enmity and the resulting contradictory, crippled consciousness and point of view that the West has created in the minds of Eastern societies that it has begun to culturally influence with the concept of modernity.” While the West experienced the process of modernization with all its pains, Eastern societies, while thinking with traditional ways of thinking without experiencing these processes historically, suddenly encountered modernity and this situation created some pathological problems (Sarıçiçek, 2018). In addition, Hybrid Consciousness and Asia in the Face of the West are among the author’s other works translated into Turkish. Daryush Shyegan’s main fields of study can be categorized as philosophy and philosophical movements. He was the president of the Iranian Institute for Civilization Studies. He collaborated with Rojin Issa and Rujin Pakbaz to publish Modern Iranian Art (2001) (Timur, 2018).
References
Timur, T. (2018). Daryush Shayegan öldü; “Kültürel Şizofreni” yaşıyor mu?. Birgün Net. Retrieved from https://www.birgun.net/haber/daryush-shayegan-oldu-kulturel-sizofreni-yasiyor-mu-210240
