Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

How Tolstoy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein treat the question life asks all of us.  Have we succeeded or failed in our lives? This question remains despite our successful careers or positions or percentage of marks obtained. Let us examine how we fare in the key test of life that poses one question to all and sundry – what is the meaning of our life?  In the words of an influential modern mystical philosopher, the most extraordinarily ordinary people are called mystics. Celebrating the ordinary is what distinguishes not only great mystics but also such modern writers as Joyce. What distinguishes another great modern writer Tolstoy is finding extraordinary grace in lives of common people – in his case Russian peasants. If life’s most important task is to find meaning of life or save one’s soul as Tolstoy would put it, the common folk succeed far better than so-called scholarly or educated elite.  Regarding the question of meaning of life that troubles every thinking pe...

Clues from Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? “The most thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age is that we are still not thinking,”______ Martin “The wasteland grows and woe to him who hides the wasteland within.” ______Friedrich Nietzsche While both Nietzsche and Heidegger said the words quoted in the beginning in somewhat different though not quite unrelated context, one recalls them readily when trying to “think” Kashmir in the context of proliferating debate on Kashmir (I don’t presume to apply Heidegger on thinking to Kashmir – this I leave to Heidegger scholars and thinkers – but only to underscore the difficulty of the task of engaging with Kashmir in the manner talk shows, conferences, political parties, gossip parties seek to do). Heidegger’s problem or objective is not to provide a map for resolving political issues but to help us attend to the deeper issues that underlie political issues. The tragedy is that one is only asked to give opinion o...