Human Beings, Knowledge, and Consciousness
Claim Formulation
For Shahrur, the human being is a free creature whose knowledge begins with hearing, reason, and abstraction; one may not judge a person’s inner being, but rather their outward action.
Why Are These Elements Grouped Together?
These atoms address the epistemological and anthropological structure of the human being: reason, the heart, the fu’ad, hearing, sight, truth, injustice, and falsehood. They also connect action with responsibility, the outward with the inward, and freedom with reckoning. This accords with Shahrur’s conception of the human being as a responsible, evolving creature who cannot be reduced to direct supernatural explanation. Hence his discussion here also includes progress, abstraction, and decision.
Grouping Elements
- The human being is a free creature with hands that work
- Abstraction is the foundation of human thought
- Reason is analysis and synthesis
- Reason derives from tying knots and connecting
- Reason is the linking of phenomena
- Arab reason reproduces itself
- Hearing precedes sight: the priority of hearing in knowledge
- The senses provide raw material
- The fu’ad is a cognitive function, not an organ
- The heart is the center of decision
- The hearts in the breasts = manifest human consciousness
- Sight is not the eye
- Truth = reality outside consciousness
- Truth is objective existence outside consciousness
- Falsehood is illusion, not merely error
- Injustice is making an erroneous decision while persisting in it
- Sin = backwardness
- Humility is knowledge, not ignorance
- True experience is practice, not hearsay
- Reckoning concerns action, not mere thought
- No judgment may be made of the human inner being
- Will is making a decision after knowledge
- Permission is one thing, and volition another
- Decree lies in what exists
- The material world is not an illusion
- Natural phenomena are governed by cosmic numbers
- Mathematics precedes physics
Place of the Grouping in the Episodes
In episodes 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 12
Conclusion
Shahrur connects knowledge with action and decision, and holds the human being responsible for practical outward conduct, not for an inner being that cannot be judged.
Program Source
This is a navigational link to the program and its episode map; it does not add textual evidence to this grouping.