Philosophy of Religion Research
Jaspers and Jawadi Amoli on the Possibility of the Knowledge of the Human Being
Document Type : Original Research
Author
Assistant Professor at Humanities Research and Development Institute (SAMT), Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
As an Existentialist, Karl Jaspers calls the nature of the human being “the existence” and believes that knowledge of the self through introspection leads a person out of himself, towards the transcendent. Jaspers maintains that in some moments in human life, the existence would be revealed as interpreted and becomes conscious of itself by going beyond the boundaries of the subject. On the other hand, Muslim philosophers say that the knowledge of the human being is possible and tied to the transcendent. As a Muslim philosopher, Jawadi Amuli addresses philosophical anthropology in a specific way. He has based his main idea about the knowledge of the human being on the notion of Fitrah. By taking different ways of the knowledge of the human being into account, he recourses to the notion of Fitrah, and by using some Quranic terms, proposes two concepts, the muhkam, and the mutashabih man. Contrary to Jaspers, who holds that existence never emerges in a single and universal form, and therefore there is no single version to know the human being, Jawadi Amoli paves the way for the genuine knowledge of the human being by drawing the idea of the muhkam man. According to Jaspers, the human being perceives “the existence” existentially by going beyond himself and in relation to the transcendent. Furthermore, Jawadi Amoli has also emphasized the relationship between self-knowledge and the knowledge of God.
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