What is meant
The author sees human knowledge as based on removing confusion between truth and falsehood, as well as between the unseen and the seen. It also extends to distinguishing between what the senses apprehend and what thought builds upon, and therefore knowledge is a continuous movement in differentiation and distinction, not a fixed state.
The atom’s structure in the atlas
- Type of argument: methodological
- Movement of the argument: making knowledge a tool for dissolving confusion between opposites.
- Key terms: knowledge, truth and falsehood, the unseen and the seen, the senses and thought.
- Degree of centrality: central.
Knowledge is given a distinguishing function, not only an accumulative one, since it is understood as an act that removes confusion between different domains and rearranges the relations among them.
Links that help with reading
- Muhammad Shahrur: The Book and the Qur’an
- The methodology of contemporary reading
- Human knowledge is relative and progresses from sense perception to mathematics
Basis
- Supporting text: «Human knowledge is made to rest on dissolving confusion between truth and falsehood, between the unseen and the seen, and between what the senses apprehend and what thought constructs».
Place of support in the book
- Book: The Book and the Qur’an.
- Location: in the final section of the book, within the treatment of legislation as human ijtihad within God’s limits.
- Type of support: nearby witness.
- Marker that helps verification: God’s limits
- Reading note: This passage is suitable as support because it states that understanding and knowledge remove confusion, and this is consistent with the atom’s making knowledge a tool for differentiation.
Degree of documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom is based on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the wording above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted textually.
Its function in the book
Its function here is definitional; it fixes a meaning or conceptual distinction on which Shahrur relies in building the idea.
Related to
Editorial note
This atom completes the definition of knowledge as a process, not a state.