The Divided State of Human Nature

The Divided State of Human Nature is Almustafa’s account of a person as internally unfinished and morally complex, containing a god-self, a human dimension, and a shapeless pigmy-self that has not yet awakened. This is not simply a contest between good and evil: the dimensions differ in awareness and development, yet remain within one being. The distinction matters most when Almustafa turns to crime and justice, insisting that neither the person who stands upright nor the one who has fallen can be understood apart from the whole human condition.

The Self as More Than One

Almustafa first denies that the god-self occupies a person alone. Much in a person is still human, he says, while much is not yet human; the latter is figured as a shapeless pigmy moving asleep through mist in search of its own awakening. The formulation sets out an unequal but shared interior life: awareness and potential coexist with a part that is obscured and not yet fully formed. The pigmy is not described as an outside enemy or a separate being. It is part of the same person, and its search for awakening gives the image a direction without promising that awakening has already occurred.

The nearby image of the god-self as the sun sharpens the contrast. The sun does not know the mole’s ways or seek the serpent’s holes; correspondingly, the god-self is presented as having a different reach of awareness from the lower, hidden life evoked by those creatures. Yet that elevated perspective cannot stand for the whole person. Almustafa’s insistence that the god-self does not dwell alone prevents the image of spiritual height from erasing the still-human and not-yet-human dimensions beneath it. The self is neither reducible to its highest possibility nor adequately described by its least-awakened part.

The Human Dimension and Moral Action

After describing the god-self and the sleeping pigmy, Almustafa announces that he will speak of the human being within a person. This shift gives the human dimension a particular role in the passage: it is the part that knows crime and punishment. Moral wrongdoing is therefore not assigned to the god-self, whose awareness is figured through the sun, or simply to the pigmy-self, whose defining condition is sleep and incomplete development. The passage locates knowledge of transgression and its penalty in the human being who stands between those images.

That distinction does not make the human dimension a wholly separate, self-contained moral agent. The preceding claim is that all these conditions inhabit one person. Read together, the images place moral knowledge within an inwardly divided but shared life: the person capable of recognizing crime and punishment also contains a higher self and an unawakened one. Almustafa thus complicates any judgment that treats a person as identical with one act, one level of awareness, or one apparent condition. The passage identifies who knows moral law while retaining the larger question of how completely any one part can represent the whole.

Justice in the Fullness of Context

Almustafa addresses those seeking to understand justice with a demand to look upon all deeds in the fullness of light. The emphasis falls on the deeds themselves and on the conditions in which they can be seen clearly. Judgment made from a partial view risks confusing a visible position with a complete account of the person: an upright figure may appear separate from a fallen one, although the passage says they are one man standing in twilight.

Twilight gives the divided condition a shared setting. The person stands between the night of the pigmy-self and the day of the god-self, not wholly identified with either pole. The image does not declare the two dimensions equivalent, or say that every act is excusable; rather, it places moral judgment within a human being whose darkness and light belong to the same life. To see deeds fully is therefore also to resist isolating the fallen from the upright as if they were different kinds of being. Justice, in this account, requires a view broad enough to hold both the act and the divided person who acts.

The Foundation and the One Person

The temple image gives this demand a final measure: the cornerstone is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation. The comparison makes rank within a structure an inadequate measure of the worth or necessity of its parts. Applied to the preceding image of the upright and fallen, it reinforces the point that the apparently elevated position cannot be treated as unrelated to the lowly one. The whole depends on what lies at its base as well as on what rises above it.

The passage’s movement—from the god-self, through the still-human and not-yet-human, to the human knower of crime and punishment, and then to justice—makes its ethical claim structural rather than merely sentimental. Full judgment depends on seeing the person as a whole whose inner conditions occupy different levels but cannot be cleanly separated. The upright and fallen remain one man in twilight; the divine day and pigmy night frame the same human life. That image supplies neither a simple verdict nor a formula for punishment. It supplies a constraint on judgment: no single visible part, whether highest or lowest, can stand in for the whole.