Daily Inspiration Quote by Abdolkarim Soroush

Concepts are supposed to be tools; Soroush is warning how quickly they become idols. The line tracks a familiar intellectual tragedy: we invent categories to make the world legible, then we mistake the map for the territory and start policing reality until it conforms. The sly bite is in “midway” - not at the beginning, when we know we’re simplifying, and not at the end, when the damage is visible, but at the point where habit hardens into certainty. That’s when analysis quietly turns into ontology: our explanatory scaffolding gets treated as the building itself.

Soroush’s intent is both epistemic and political. As an Iranian philosopher deeply shaped by post-revolution debates, he’s speaking to a culture where abstract terms - “Islam,” “the West,” “modernity,” “authenticity,” “the people,” even “science” - often function as weapons. Once a concept is equated with reality, disagreement becomes not a dispute over interpretation but a threat to truth. The subtext is a critique of ideological closure: regimes, parties, and even intellectual schools love concepts precisely because they’re portable and enforceable. Reality is messy; concepts are clean. Clean things are easier to govern.

The quote also carries a quiet challenge to religious and secular dogmatists alike. Soroush isn’t asking us to abandon concepts; he’s asking for a disciplined humility about their status. The most sophisticated mind, he implies, is the one that can hold its categories lightly - using them to think without letting them think on its behalf.