Larijani and Kant: Reason and Intuition

The Iranian leader reinterprets Kant's epistemology presenting synthetic a priori and intuition as parallel foundations of human understanding.

Ali Larijani is an Iranian political leader who has played a prominent role in the Islamic Republic for more than two decades. Trained originally in mathematics and computer science at Sharif University of Technology and later holding a doctorate in philosophy from University of Tehran, Larijani represents a rare combination of political authority and philosophical scholarship within contemporary state leadership. He served in several influential positions, including head of the state broadcasting organization and, most notably, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament from 2008 to 2020, and he currently acts as the leader of the Iranian National Security Council, which is believed to be the de facto supreme authority in Iran under the war.

Alongside his political career, Larijani has maintained a sustained engagement with philosophy, particularly through a series of works on the thought of Immanuel Kant, in which he explores the epistemological foundations of science, mathematics, and religious knowledge. His intellectual profile therefore places him among a small group of political figures in the contemporary world who combine active state leadership with serious philosophical inquiry.

The philosophical interests of Ali Larijani occupy an unusual place within contemporary Iranian intellectual life. The curiosity surrounding his philosophical work stems from the direction of his philosophical inquiry itself. In a country where the dominant intellectual currents have largely revolved around either the critique of Western modernity or the revival of classical Islamic philosophy, Larijani chose to engage deeply with one of the central architects of modern Western thought: Immanuel Kant.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Iranian philosophical debates have largely developed along two influential lines. One current revolves around the existential critique of Western civilization inspired by Martin Heidegger, associated particularly with the intellectual tradition of Ahmad Fardid. This current views modern Western rationality as spiritually empty and historically exhausted, advocating a return to more authentic metaphysical horizons beyond modern technological civilization.

The second current centers on the revival of Islamic metaphysics through the tradition known as Hikmat al-Muta‘aliyah, or Transcendent Philosophy, associated with Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i and grounded in the philosophical synthesis of Mulla Sadra. This tradition seeks to reconcile rational philosophy with mystical intuition, presenting knowledge as the product of both reason and spiritual experience.

Against this background, Larijani’s engagement with Kant represents an intriguing intellectual shift. Kant is not typically the philosopher to whom critics of Western modernity turn. On the contrary, Kant stands at the very foundation of modern philosophical rationalism. His philosophy established the critical framework that shaped modern epistemology, ethics, and the philosophical understanding of science. Yet Kant’s project was also a profound attempt to redefine the place of religion within the modern intellectual order.

Larijani’s philosophical work reflects a deep engagement with this Kantian project. He has authored three books devoted specifically to Kant’s philosophy. The first, Ravesh-e Riazi (“The Mathematical Method”), explores Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. In this work Larijani investigates the epistemological foundations of mathematical knowledge in Kant’s thought, particularly the idea that mathematical propositions are not merely empirical generalizations but possess a unique cognitive status grounded in the structure of human understanding.

His second book, Metafizik va Olum-e Daqiqeh (“Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences”), addresses the distinction between metaphysical knowledge and scientific knowledge.

The third book, Shuhud va Qazaya-ye Ta’lifi-ye Ma-Taqaddom (“Intuition and Synthetic A Priori Propositions”), focuses on the concept of synthetic a priori judgments and the role of intuition in human cognition. In Kant’s philosophy, synthetic a priori judgments constitute the foundation of mathematics and natural science, because they express knowledge that is both necessarily true and yet not derived from empirical observation.

In Kant’s epistemology, certain forms of knowledge arise from the structure of human cognition itself rather than from experience. The famous example Kant provides is the mathematical proposition that 5 + 7 = 12. This proposition is not simply learned from observation; rather, it emerges from the innate structures through which the human mind organizes experience. Kant called such knowledge synthetic a priori because it extends our knowledge (synthetic) while remaining independent of empirical verification (a priori).

Larijani argues that this epistemological principle has implications that extend beyond mathematics and science. If the foundations of scientific and mathematical knowledge themselves rely upon a form of pre-experiential cognitive intuition, then the intuitive basis of religious knowledge cannot simply be dismissed as irrational or inferior. According to Larijani’s interpretation, both scientific knowledge and religious knowledge ultimately rest upon foundational intuitions. They differ in their domains and methods, but they do not stand in a hierarchy in which one possesses absolute epistemic superiority over the other.

This interpretation leads Larijani to an intriguing philosophical position. Scientific knowledge, mathematical knowledge, and religious knowledge are not mutually contradictory systems. Rather, they represent distinct modes of human cognition grounded in different forms of intuition. Scientific reasoning relies on the synthetic a priori structures that make mathematics and physics possible. Religious and metaphysical knowledge, by contrast, rely on existential or spiritual intuition. Both forms of knowledge ultimately depend upon foundational assumptions that cannot themselves be proven by empirical methods.

Larijani’s philosophical project can be understood as an attempt to reinterpret Kant in a way that preserves the legitimacy of religious knowledge within a modern epistemological framework. Kant himself pursued a similar project in his famous book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, a work that sought to reinterpret religious belief within the boundaries established by critical philosophy.

Kant’s broader philosophical system rests on a crucial division between theoretical reason and practical reason. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously rejected the possibility of proving the existence of God or the immortality of the soul through theoretical argument. Traditional metaphysical proofs of theology, he argued, exceed the limits of human cognition. Yet in Critique of Practical Reason, Kant reintroduced God, freedom, and immortality as necessary postulates of moral reason. They are not theoretical conclusions but practical necessities arising from the moral structure of human life.

The tension between these two dimensions of Kant’s philosophy—the critical limitation of theoretical reason and the affirmation of moral faith—became one of the defining problems of modern philosophy. Subsequent philosophical traditions developed largely in response to this division. Some thinkers embraced Kant’s critical epistemology while abandoning his moral metaphysics, thereby laying the foundations for radical scientific rationalism. Others emphasized the ethical dimension of Kant’s philosophy and developed existential or moral interpretations of human freedom. A third tradition attempted to overcome the Kantian dualism altogether by seeking a deeper unity between reason and historical existence, a project that culminated in the dialectical philosophies of Hegel and Marx.

Larijani’s interpretation of Kant moves closer to the existential side of this intellectual inheritance, though in a distinctive way. Rather than rejecting rationality, he attempts to expand the concept of intuition itself as a shared foundation for multiple domains of knowledge. He represents a rare example of a state leader who has pursued formal philosophical education and contributed to philosophical debates through published works. We can’t here skip the irony of a leader of a Third World state who holds a doctoral degree and writes books on Kant fighting a leader of the United States who struggles to articulate a full meaningful statement.