This reflection is not directly tied to any particular verse/sign in revelation. It is prompted by a set of observations about two ways (there may be more!) I think people deal with life, both of which I find inadequate. And I see revelation proposing or offering a third possibility, one that is least understood and explored but one that I find reconciles me with life where the other two options fail.
The first way (lets call it honest discrimination) is, in my view, half right. The second way is an escapist’s lie. And then there is a third way..
The first way could be explained as such: I see a person who is blind (can’t see with his eyes). I see a person with sight. And I refuse to say that this makes no difference. Or, for instance, I am unemployed and struggling financially. And then I am employed with a hefty compensation. I refuse to see these two conditions as ‘the same’ and ‘equal’. Instead, I say that the one is better than the other. I say that having ‘x’ is better than not having ‘x’. I say that in my life, it is/was bad that I did not have ‘x’ (or that I had it and i lost it.) I refuse to equalize health and illness poverty and plenty, sight and blindness, a full stomach and hunger and so on. I refuse to play the ‘what looks and feels bad and painful is the same as what looks and feels good and pleasurable’ game. I consider it a matter of honesty and integrity to call a spade, a spade. It is not good, I say, that a person was deprived of justice. I refuse to say that there is no reason to protest against the existence of such a thing (and other such things). My philosophy is that there are indeed degrees of good and beautiful in the world (from really beautiful and desirable and good and really odious and undesirable and bad). I look at my life with this lens and I see that there are things I can say are/were good and then there are things that I can say are/were terrible. And I am happy and pleased with what was good and I am unhappy and sad and angry about things that were not good. In this philosophy, I am someone who does not negate all that was good simply because it passed away or simply because there are non-good things in my life (or the world). Yes, the passing of what is good is painful but this pain exists side by side with another unassailable truth – that the thing whose passing is painful was good! So long as pain exists, the acknowledgment that what passed was good also exists. One cannot feel that since the good passed, it was not good at all! If one stopped thinking it was good, one would not feel any pain anymore. But this does not happen. I continue to feel the pain because (and so long as) I feel what passed is/was good! And so in this framework, I must live my half-truth. This philosophy is half-true (to me) because it rightly observes and acknowledges distinctions found in humanly experienced reality – some things are good and some are not and therefore one cannot be happy or grateful about the things that aren’t good. One has to wish those things to be differen than they are or were! One has to, to go back to the example above, want the blind child to have eyes and feel sad about him/her not being able to see. One has to want to help and cure the blindness if possible. One has to want the uneducated to be educated, the unemployed to be able to earn a livelihood, the oppressed to not be oppressed and so on. And to the extend one feels one has suffered loss and deprivation, one is rightly indignant and angry about those losses and deprivations and injustices and unhappy and ungrateful (or rather non-grateful) about them. To the extent that this philosophy is honest and unafraid in saying that this is better and that is worse and is unafraid to say that not everything is good, it is right. It does not allow a cheap equivalence between, for instance, healthfulness and being miserably ill or between being poor and oppressed and being rich and powerful.
The second philosophy is what I call an escapist’s lie. It is a philosophy by which, often motivated by the imperative to be ‘grateful for everything’ or to be grateful ‘in all conditions/situations’, one asserts (but is not convinced at all about it rationally or even emotionally, that being poor and being rich, being healthy and being ill, being badly treated and being nicely treated etc etc. makes no real difference – they are all good and nothing is really bad (and only appears bad to an ungodly, rebellious, ingrate) and one should therefore be pleased with it all and declare and insist that what appears bad is not really bad and what appears to be something one protests and dislikes is not to be disliked and protested. the outcome this philosophy promises – a state of unperturbed bliss – can be attractive for some (especially those who have suffered long enough from the various ‘bads’ in their lives and also those who have never felt/thought deeply enough to feel the painful elements of existence so long as their own life seems fair and good to them and they get everything they want because what they want are just that… things). I dont know why but I find this ‘everything is great’ attitude a total lie, a flattening of the degrees (to the point of contrasts and oppositions) of perfection that I witness and experience as a human being. On their own, starvation is not the same as (and is worse than) satiation, illness and loss of function of an organ worse than health and full-functioning organs and so on. And I wish to say three words again: “On Their Own”! That is to say, there is a greater degree of perfection and beauty and pleasure in one kind of creation than another. This is not controversial and cannot be controverted without resorting to denying the senses and telling a lie, simply to escape from or ignore the ‘no’ that one’s reason says to a particular, undesirable, painful, creation. When I try to walk as an old man and can’t walk without falling, it is not the same as being able to walk without falling. There is less perfection in falling. There is less goodness in falling. There is more goodness and perfection in being able to walk without falling and needing someone to hold you constantly so that you can take a few steps. Being raped is not the same as not being raped and so on and so on. This second philosophy has one merit – it flags the human need to escape from the brutal and painful life that the first philosophy leaves me with. The escape may not be rational if it requires the erasure and denial of distinctions between (or degrees of) good and bad, desirable and undesirable states of being. I find myself uncomfortable and unreconciled in the first philosophy. In the second, I am asked to feign or fake reconciliation by denying the distinctions that cause me to be unreconciled to existence and stop me from declaring ‘amor fati’ (love of fate) i.e. that whatever has happened has been so perfect that I would want exactly that to happen/return forever without any change. I dont yet find existence perfect such that I am reconciled to (i.e. accepting of and pleased with) such existence, eternally.
There is a third way that I need. And the door to this third way is ‘in the name of..’ To use less theologically charged language, I could call it the door of meaning. Two things are different e.g. starvation and satiation but they could be reconciled if they could be shown (or be seen and experienced) as ‘meaning’ the same thing. I think you should be able to fill out the details of this third way yourself, based on what I have said already. So I am going to leave this here and perhaps come back to it at a later time. but there is a third way that does not leave me unreconciled and that does not ask me to negate the existence of degrees of perfection (or of presence and absence/lack) but instead provides a rational argument in favor of the meanings that those varying degrees of perfection (the pairs and the opposites) display/indicate and in light of those meanings, the two otherwise different conditions/realities, converge and can become ‘the same’ or ‘equal’ with respect to those meanings.
The Quran as Revelation 