EXISTENTIALISM: MISQUOTING EXISTENCE

Existentialism: Misquoting Existence

Have we ever pondered on the charades we witness each day. The leering human imagination, the mundane explanations of the unexplained, the loud display of emotions. In the end it comes to rest on our conscience that we do what we never wanted to do. Is it our sociological background or our want to be known or to be recognized or to be loved?

Existentialism defines our objectives that guide us in what we so emphatically call "its my life". But are we interpreting the sacred ethics of existentialism so righteously followed by lord Krishna, Jean Paul Satre and Mahatama Gandhi? Is it not the path that we are answerable to rather than the prejudices that we gather along the way? We take the changes, which we encounter, in our day-to-day life in the way, which our mental explanations put them to colour. Have we ever thought that the way is as important as the entities that traverse them? Why?
Because somewhere down the line we do have to consider our surroundings.

Rousseau aptly remarked," man is a social animal." It so answers all our problems and prejudices. Our actions in the past, present or future conform to our relations and associated beliefs with our surroundings. If not wholly at least to varying degrees of sociological and psychological influence.

To judge events on just there effects on individuals would be undermining their importance. Even before stirring individuals these events are rooted in societal influences. How then do we consider an individual solely responsible for his actions? Plato said," idea is real and virtue is knowledge." Which it self stipulates that there is nothing like an ‘original’ thing, we get the intimation from our surroundings.

Of course it is one or a group that unearths the hidden signs and shapes them. But does that signify that that person or group should reap the benefits?

That was what Mahatama Gandhi always wanted to teach us. Share and in sharing will you find the essence of pure joy. Is it not synomous with the teachings of the Bhagwad Gita? Which is why Lord Krishna is the biggest exponent of existentionalism.

Jeremy Bentham remarked, "We take those things which look pleasurable to us and ignore those which cause us pain." Today we interpret existentionalism in the same vein. We expect others to do the job and they others and the chain goes on.

All it takes is to end with Robert brownnings famous quote, "Thou improve thyself and thou shall find a rascal less in the world."