One Answer with a bunch of Questions

Following my previous post "reading conservatives respectfully", I received a very valuable and meticulous comment and criticism by my good friend Rasul Namazi. 

Because of the fact that I find the discussion useful for many of this weblog's readers, I write my answer to Rasul in the form of a new post, instead of putting it just as a comment.

I wrote "Reading Conservatives Respectfully" in hurry, the same time as I was reading Dr Sebastioano Maffettone's book Rawls: An Introduction. Therefore I made some mistakes in my reading of the sentence by Rawls concerning the way he taught the famous works in his history of moral and political philosophy.

Rasul correctly noted me that part of sentence is originally delivered by John Stuart Mill, in his review of Alfred Sidgwick. Rawls mentions it within his short piece "Some Remarks on My Teaching" (1993) and Samuel Freeman, the former student of Rawls and the editor of Rawls's Lectures on History of Political Philosophy (2007), brings that short piece in his forward to Lecturs on History of Political Philosophy which was published only after Rawls's death in 2002.

"Some Remarks on My Teaching" is very interesting to read. It give very usfull advices about how to read important works in history of philosophy. It is not a long essay - only 2-3 pages. An almost complete quotation of the parts related to my debate with Rasul comes as follows:

For the most part I taught moral and political philosophy, doing a course in each one every year over the years.... I came gradually to focus more and more on political and social philosophy....beginning with Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and occasionally Kant,....Hume and Bentham, J. S. Mill and Sidgwick....

In talking about these people I always tried to do two things especially. One thing was to pose their philosophical problems as they saw them, given what their understanding of the state of moral and political philosophy then was. So I tried to discern what they thought their main problems were.....[it would be quite better] to look for a writer’s point of view on the political world at that time in order to see how political philosophy develops over time and why..... 

Another thing I tried to do was to present each writer’s thought in what I took to be its strongest form. I took to heart Mill’s remark in his review of [Alfred] Sedgwick: “A doctrine is not judged at all until it is judged in its best form” (CW: X, p. 52). So I tried to do just that. Yet I didn’t say, not intentionally anyway, what to my mind they should have said, but what they did say, supported by what I viewed as the most reasonable interpretation of their text. The text had to be known and respected, and the doctrine presented in its best form. Leaving aside the text seemed offensive, a kind of pretending... (Lectures on History of Political Philosophy, Editor's Forward, pp. xiii-xiv)

The red lines are the sentences I quoted in my previous post from Sebastiano Maffettone's book. Putting the red lines in the whole phrase shows that Rasul is correct in remembring me that what Rawls means here is only about how to correctly read the philosophical texts. Rasul says:

"I guess what Mill means is fidelity to the original text, which of course is a priori principle of any interpretation of texts. It’s necessary to stay as close as possible to the text in order to understand what it really means."

This is also correct that there is nothing in Rawls's paragraph above to do with neglecting politically incorrect parts of the texts written by conservative authors in order to promote democracy or dialogue with them. 

But here some new questions are raised according to me:

1- "To Stay as close as possible" which seems to be suggested by Rawls not only is an appropriate method to read works in the history of philosophy - as Rawls says- but also every "text" as such- one might argue. How we can use it while reading Motahhari and Ayatollah Khomeni whose works of course are very different from those of Mill, Rousseau and Marx?

2- Are Mir Hossein Musavi, Karrubi and Khatami's democratic readings of Ayatollah Khomeini (if we take all his words, writings and speech as a text) only an unscientific but politically useful reading which has to be finally put aside in favor of a more scientific and correct ones? In which ways we can persuade the people who are still highly believing in Khomeini's charisma to go beyond him and in the meanwhile not destroying him, as a friend i.e. the owner of Boof weblog, properly commented on my previous post about liberal reading of Khomeini?

3- And finally, speaking from a moral point of view, shall reformist politicians- like Mousavi, Karubi and Khatami- appeal to politically useful, but scientifically unjustifiable, interpretations of very influential and still controversial figures in history of Iran, such as Ayatollah Khomeini, as a political strategy for transition to democracy? 

It seems to me depending on ours accepting either a deontological or consequentioanlist view in moral philosophy, the answer would be quite different.