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...

They probe life and come up with insights we direly need. Name the best short story or novel in the world literature and one is most likely to answer some writing from Russian literature. By general consensus Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are the greatest novelists. To be the greatest novelist is to be the greatest teacher of life.       We hardly live life; don’t know its beauty, glory and meaning. We are enslaved by what Schopenhauer called Will and live life as if under bondage. We have complaints and grudges against almost everyone; we keep cursing others and even ourselves at times. We come and go without having learnt the meaning of life with all its challenges, guilt, violence, tragedy, horror and countless distractions and games that ego invents to avoid facing reality of nothingness within. The question is “where is life lost in living?” – in vegetating, in complaining, in cursing, in “fret and fever,” in day dreaming, in begging for fame or recognition. ...