In Defence of Mysticism
Aydin Areta

Mysticism! Mysticism for hungry stomachs and full stomachs alike! A narcotic that brings comfort to both, and mystics who feed their mysticism to a nation at the going rate—a nation seeking an easy medicine for reducing its millennia-old anxiety. A nation cut off from its individuality and freedom, asleep for centuries on the pillow of its poetry and mysticism, captivated by generalities and recitations of verse as an escape from clear and precise expression.

If this is how you describe our pain, I too feel that pain and share it with you. I too see this same lethargic darkness in the shadowed corners of the image of Iran today.

Yet every time I look sadly at this image and phrases like those above parade through my mind, I hear Spinoza's calm voice reminding me firmly: “Do not weep, do not complain—understand!”

And how difficult understanding becomes when one tries genuinely to remain committed to it.

As a first principle, we must always remember that what we see on the surface is sometimes not the whole truth.

In recent years, there has been no shortage in this land of lamentation, complaint and chronicles of pain about what has happened to us. These accounts of suffering have become the dominant narrative of our reform-minded intellectual current: “modern perceptions of a painful history.” Yet there is something in this modern perception that reverses the dialectic of history and the causal relations of what has happened to us, interpreting them from the end back toward the beginning.

To understand historical phenomena, as with any phenomenon, we must begin with interpretation in the sense of returning phenomena to the truth of what they are.

The question “What is mysticism?” requires that we interpret mysticism by returning it to its fundamental and historical truth. Otherwise, every historical phenomenon possesses dozens of social and historical manifestations that may have nothing in common beyond a superficial shell.

The word “mysticism” is as general a term as words such as state, freedom, philosophy, education and myth.

Terms of this kind have flowed through human history, and alongside their general functions in history, they have been interpreted differently in every age. To interpret concepts of this sort, we are compelled to undertake their genealogy.

There is a simple but vulgar method for understanding deep historical phenomena in the modern world: the modern thinker imposes his contemporary understanding upon a phenomenon and then rereads history through the lens of that understanding.

For example, imagining premodern human beings as less rational than himself, he treats “myth” as a prescientific explanation of scientific and causal relations among worldly phenomena. He reduces the whole meaning of mythic narratives to ridiculous stories told by simple and poorly informed people who, unlike modern humans, did not understand that lightning is produced not by Zeus's spear but by electrical exchange in clouds. He fails to understand that interest in the “world of things” is itself largely a modern phenomenon, whereas premodern humanity was more often seeking answers about the “world of actions.” Beneath every story are deep layers of reflection accumulated across human generations about how to live in this world—layers that can still possess remarkable depth today.

This reduction of concepts in the modern world might be called “modern literalism” or “modern formalism”: the modern person offers “formal and final definitions” of historical phenomena such as God, religion, myth, philosophy and mysticism, and even of concepts such as freedom and justice, in order to congratulate himself on his intelligence—not only believing that he has solved the pain of all historical problems, but also registering his own cure as the cure of cures at the supposed end of human history.

To avoid modern literalism, at some point we must stop and ask ourselves deeper questions. We must remain committed to the difficulty of understanding. We need questions that demand something more profound than the claim that “the reason for our suffering today,” or even “the despotism of our history,” lies in “mysticism and the lethargic, poetry-obsessed Iranian spirit,” and that the remedy is “modernisation through moving beyond these historical afflictions.”

A simplistic mentality always seeks dualism in its formal definitions. The dualisms between religion and science, mysticism and philosophy, mysticism and science, tradition and modernity, and West and East exist only on a superficial layer of truth and in the mind of modern humanity. It first constructs its official definitions and its dualisms, and then attacks the opposite pole. This is a dualism that, I believe, we can—and are free to—move beyond.

The real struggle and the fundamental dualism have never been between modernity and tradition, today's world and the world of the past, or modern and historical humanity. History did not end with the human being of the past, and it will not end with the human being of today.