Temperament Genre: An Explanatory View

In the past and present, among Iranians and foreigners, there were people who, based on their observations, have written about the Iranian temperament. Those judgments, which were mostly negative, gradually constituted an explanatory matrix, so that, in explaining many bad circumstances among many Iranian people, it has been said that they derived from Iranian temperament or Iran’s culture. About how valid are observational propositions such as “Iranians have this or that quality”, and explanatory propositions such as “this or that quality or behavior is the effect of this or that temperament” there are some critical discussions, especially concerning inexactness of some generalizations as well as some probable dangers of the acceptance of such judgments. This paper is to criticize this kind of propositions from an analytical point of view. It will demonstrate that the difficulty of explaining the cause of these qualities among Iranians suggests that the main problem is not in proving the prevalence of these traits among Iranians, but in proving its absence among non-Iranians. The hypothesis is that most of the cases known as Iranians temperaments, to the extent that they are approved as Iranians temperaments, are not because of Iranian culture but its level. This level of culture is not something special to Iranians, but it can be found among many nations, and everywhere it introduces almost the same temperament