Positivism and the Fruit of Truth

Positivism and the Fruit of Truth

Truth Telling Series, Part VIII

By John Taylor; 17 December, 2005

Yesterday we glanced at Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, a morality
play that a deeply hypocritical bourgeoisie tried to suppress just
around the time when Baha'u'llah questioned it for worshipping names.
One may well ask. What is a name that describes nothing? A deception
at best, a lie at worst. The civilization of the West had people
sacrificing their all for airy nothing, since, Baha'u'llah admonished
them, whatever does not relate to God is valueless. Even family, the
foundation of society, becomes nothing but a hollow name without truth
or value. This existential quandary does not come out of a clear blue
sky, it is payback. Baha'u'llah says that their vain imaginings took
hold of them in requital for what their hands had wrought.

The story of Madam Bovary shows how false word and deed, lies and
deceptions can become embodied in personal existence; a faithless wife
was embroiled to the end of her days in worthless desires while
married to an uncritical medical practitioner who lured unsuspecting
patients into a harmful, irreversible surgical procedure. Together
they make up to a single lie, false faith and unscientific knowledge.
Such misery multiplied in a thousand wasted careers and agonized,
self-deluding hearts degrades the social fact into a mere name.
Baha'u'llah continues,

"Consider the pettiness of men's minds, they seek with utmost exertion
that which profiteth them not, and yet wert thou to ask of them: `Is
there any advantage in that which ye desire?,' thou wouldst find them
sorely perplexed." (Summons, 82-3)

He hastens to add that no fair-minded soul would answer yes to this
question. In order to be just and true effort and sacrifice in life
and career must be for something profitable to oneself, to others or
preferably both. It seems to me that this question of profit or
advantage is key to understanding how lies disseminate in society and
leave only name worship behind. "Such is the condition of the people
and of that which they possess." The only thing left for the Spirit to
do is turn away and worship God.

Baha'u'llah in this Tablet to Napoleon III calls onto the carpet the
ruling ideologies of the West, positivism and modernism, as understood
in that era. Injustice is woven into them, and as a result all held
dear becomes mere name worship. Name worship -- or ideology -- is
worse than idolatry since an idol at least has physical substance
whereas an empty name is nothing at all, a false illusion without
substance.

Let us take a closer look at positivism. In one sense, positivism can
mean belief in progress through accumulation of knowledge. According
to this Darwinism, Freudianism, Communism, and even the Baha'i Faith
are positivist. At that time, however, positivism was taken as
outright denial of metaphysics and theology. Positivists held only
scientific knowledge as of value, and when it did not fit, as in the
social sciences, it was made to fit with lies and half-truths.

Gustave Flaubert himself, through his reading of Spenser and others,
came to reject the dogmatic, exclusionist kind positivism and in the
end flirted with something close to the Baha'i principle that science
and religion are harmonious as long as each keeps within its own
limits. This is reflected in Flaubert's early work, Madame Bovary,
which takes the religious-superstitious wing of the bird to task, as
well as his later novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet, which satirizes the
other positivist wing, scientism, the superficial misunderstanding and
misapplication of science.

Religious superstition and scientism will not let go their grip so
long as God is kept out of the equation. And until we include Him,
Baha'u'llah warns, we will never be just, or even come to grips with
what profits or harms us.

What a Manifestation of God does for truth is to embody in His Being a
clear criterion between right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Without
that balance by which to judge what is of benefit, a civilization
loses its bearings, ceases to moderate and like an addict can only
mistake truth for error and error for truth. This wisdom can only take
root when planted deep in the soul, as all scriptures teach, including
the Qu'ran.

"In the past We granted to Moses and Aaron the Criterion (for
judgment), and a Light and a Message for those who would do right.
Those who fear their Lord in their most secret thoughts, and who hold
the Hour (of Judgment) in awe. (Qur'an 21:48-49, Yusuf Ali tr)

By rights this Qu'ranic idea of a Furqan or Criterion should have
given birth to science in the Islamic civilization but unfortunately
its corruption resulted in a castration or divorce between its mystics
or Sufis, who called themselves the People of the Truth (Ahl-i-Haqiqa)
and its legalists (Ahl-i-Shari'a, people of religious law). Science
fled its cradle and became identified with the European enlightenment.
The Bab offered an explanation as to why this happened.

"Ponder a while and observe that everything in Islam hath its ultimate
and eventual beginning in the Book of God. Consider likewise the Day
of the Revelation of Him Whom God shall make manifest, He in Whose
grasp lieth the source of proofs, and let not erroneous considerations
shut thee out from Him, for He is immeasurably exalted above them,
inasmuch as every proof proceedeth from the Book of God which is
itself the supreme testimony, as all men are powerless to produce its
like. Should myriads of men of learning, versed in logic, in the
science of grammar, in law, in jurisprudence and the like, turn away
from the Book of God, they would still be pronounced unbelievers. Thus
the fruit is within the supreme testimony itself, not in the things
derived therefrom. And know thou of a certainty that every letter
revealed in the Bayan is solely intended to evoke submission unto Him
Whom God shall make manifest, for it is He Who hath revealed the Bayan
prior to His Own manifestation." (Selections, 104, Persian Bayan, V,
8)

The Sufis not only rejected the "source of proofs," they also spurned
obedience to the Qu'ranic law as essential step in the path to truth.
They held that enlightenment comes only to the elect after a long
journey to mystic truth assisted by a Pir, or guide.

"The Sufi must first reach the state of fana (passing away of the
self), in which he becomes free from attachment to the earthly world
and loses himself entirely in God. After he is awakened from that
state he attains the state of baqi (subsistence), and Haqiqah
(reality, truth) is revealed to him." (Haqiqah. Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Retrieved December 13, 2005, from Encyclopaedia Britannica
2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD)

Baha'u'llah had first hand contact with the Sufis and was extremely
critical of the results of their devotional quest. Some of their
spectacular devotional feats He called "naught but tricks, fraud and
deception..." He severely applied the same criterion to them that He
did to Western positivism and its complete rejection of both religious
law and mysticism. In both cases He asked: "What good or benefit are
you accomplishing?" Of Sufis He wrote,

"Shouldst thou behold the mystic knowledge of the mystics, thou wilt
know that, by My Life, all rove distraught in the wilderness of vain
imaginations and are drowned in the sea of idle fancies. Should any
one, for example, study geometry in this day, such a pursuit is
exalted in the sight of God above memorizing all the books written by
the mystics inasmuch as the former yieldeth fruit, but the latter doth
not." (quoted in, Nader Saiedi, Logos and Civilization, pp. 40-41)

A society that is "true," then, will be made up of individuals who not
only seek truth for a reason (profit) but who are qualified to judge
the worth of entire bodies of knowledge according to the fruit they
bear. Whether a body of knowledge claims allegiance to the East or to
the West, to science or religion, it will still have to justify itself
to every new investigator. The same applies to one's love life, what
Flaubert appropriately called a person's "sentimental education." The
fruitfulness of both knowledge and love is essential to both personal
happiness and the true kind of positivism in society.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com