Bahai Philosophy and the Question of the Environment

theoretical framework, the separation and alienation of culture, or social reality, from nature, or

natural world, was unthinkable.

As Foucault and others have pointed out, the traditional conception of reality was based

upon an epistemology of

resemblance

All being was understood as a living organic reality with

interconnected parts. This reality was perceived to be organized in a hierarchy of levels such that

each level mirrored all of reality. Each level or circle was assumed to be constituted by internal

relations which were proportionate to the relation among the levels or circles themselves. For

instance, the relation of God and the created world was repeated in the relation of soul to body,

reason to passion, king to subjects, man to woman, free to slave, and the like. Consequently the

epistemology of resemblance was based upon the logic of proportionality, metaphor, analogy,

and similitude. One of the most important expressions of this organic idea of reality was the

ancient Greek notion of the microcosm and macrocosm. According to classical Greek

philosophy, the human being was the mirror of the cosmos, containing within itself all of reality.

This theory not only affirmed the organic structure of being as such, but it also postulated a

relation of solidarity between human beings and nature.

The same organic conception of the universe was emphasized in the mystic doctrines of

Pythagoras, according to whom all reality was constituted by a mathematical logic identical with

the cosmic

logos

or reason. All the heavenly bodies were thought to be organized in relations of

proportionality corresponding to musical tones and intervals, and together they created a cosmic

harmony and melody, the “music of the spheres.” The same logic of resemblance and proportion

was emphasized by other Greek philosophers and was repeated in Medieval Christian, Islamic,

and Jewish thought as philosophers conceived of the cosmos in terms of conscious and rational

realities like the “world soul” and heavenly bodies with intellect. The universe was thought to be

filled with intellects and souls characterized by love, sympathy, meditation, and self-

consciousness which determined the movements of stars and events on the earth. Causation was

perceived in various ways including the possibility of affecting phenomena through relations of

sympathy, antipathy, and affect. It was a universe filled with ghosts, spirits, and magic. Magical

consciousness was the necessary product of this causation of sympathy and the proportional logic

of reality, in which changing the proportion of certain elements could alter the course of events at

will.

The same spiritual and magical conception of nature can be found among the humanists

of the Renaissance. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries we witness the last systematic

expression of the same organic logic in Western societies. One of the most important