Formulation of the claim
Arkoun holds that the human being combines the spiritual and the mundane in a single unity.
Explanation
Within Arkoun’s thought, this claim is understood as a rejection of dividing the human being into two separate dimensions that never meet. For him, the human being is not reducible to material experience nor to transcendent experience; rather, existence rests on the interplay of these two dimensions.
This unity acquires its importance because it prevents religion from being viewed outside the conditions of human life, just as it prevents the human being from being confined solely to a social or historical function. The issue thus appears in Arkoun as part of a broader understanding of the human being and their place within religious and cultural discourse.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom belongs to the general features the book records about Arkoun’s conception of the human being, where his critique of closed conceptions is tied to an effort to highlight the composite nature of human existence. It is close to his theses that rethink the relationship between religious meaning and the lived human experience, without any rigid separation between them.
Limits of the claim
This atom should not be read as carrying more than it can support; it does not present a detailed theory of the human being, nor does it imply a complete equivalence between the spiritual and the mundane or the erasure of the differences between them. What is meant is to indicate their presence together in the structure of the human being as Arkoun sees it.