Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Fate



    Philosophers are often misunderstood on account of their individualism, eccentricity, or studied divergence of views. When Alexander the Great traveled to meet the philosopher Diogenes and offered to grant any request he made, Diogenes snapped nonchalantly: “Stand out of my light!”

    The King was neither amused nor miffed by the gaucherie. He knew the stature of the threadbare Diogenes who preferred to live in a tub rather than a palace. Alexander is reported to have said to some of his courtiers later, “… had I not been Alexander, I would have loved to be Diogenes.”

     Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood philosophers of the nineteenth century. He has been held responsible for the death of God. He has been charged with racism and antisemitism. He is believed to have sown the seeds of fascism and the final solution in the last book published after his death.

    His notion of the ubermensch is construed to be a blind worship of the superman who towers above the huge debris of the God we worshipped since the dawn of civilization. This skein of tangled threads of misunderstanding can be disentangled one by one by putting his ideas in proper perspective.

    Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati occurs in some of his predecessors like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. It is the cornerstone of stoicism. Accept your fate, all the stoics advise. Endure it with patience and resignation. Nietzsche adds a liberal dose of enthusiasm and gusto to the prescribed formula in order to counteract any residue or sediment of toxicity in amor fati. In terms of ethics, he valorizes it far above stoicism which often smacks of passivity and fatalism.

    Amor fati in Latin means loving your fate. When you love your fate, you accept it unconditionally without any self-recrimination, self-pity, regrets, or remorse, or the recurrent scenarios of what could have been and what might have been. Amor fati, when practiced in the right spirit, recycles the ruins of the dead past into citadel of creativity and self-renewal. The heaps of debris re-form themselves into a solid bastion of courage and endurance. You say yes to all you have lost and suffered.

    “Become what you are!” is one of the recurrent paradoxical exhortations of Nietzsche. Amor fati affirms your arduous journey from way back in the past to the present moment. It is a continuum, a workshop, in which you are forging and reshaping yourself in the smithy of trials and tribulations. You are what you are at this moment because of the bonfire that engulfed all the beauty and bounty you had invested in your Garden of Eden.

    Amor fati exudes the incense of empowerment and self-discovery. You are a survivor on the go. A hero redivivus. Rename your journey as an adventure, a voyage, an odyssey.

    What does not kill you, strengthens you, affirms Nietzsche.

Popular posts from this blog

Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Help

Image
 The title of this post is far from appropriate. Help is far too general and non-specific a word to exclude any mortal self-reliant enough not to need any support from a relative or friend or even a stranger. Human beings are brittle vessels intrinsically liable to dents, cracks, and damage. We need good Samaritans to prop us up when the sinewy body reels and the soul threatens to crash in a flat spin. What I want to discuss briefly is the enormous popularity of books on self-help since 1950 onwards. Visit any book stall and you find an array of self-help books displayed prominently. Ask the manager about the demand and the sales generated, and she will tell you how briskly they sell. Students on the threshold of the job market invariably browse through books on effective communication, body language, etiquette, general knowledge, and interview techniques that will equip them with the skills and the gumption to secure a lucrative position. I have been, of late, on a spree of reading an
Read more

Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Lessons

Image
  I was about to select the title Life Lessons but, on an impulse, I omitted the modifier and settled for the simple one word which is so comprehensive it subsumes not only the nanosecond but eternity also. Life lessons, for lack of an equally imprecise variant, are dispensed at reduced rates in the media and the market. It was Luiza's quiddity not to adhere to a preconceived syllabus. Her syllabus was you---the individual before her---regardless of age or antecedents. Her approach to the topic under discussion was interdisciplinary, anecdotal and wherever possible, empirical. She would show you the difference between a stalk and a stem, between a petal and a sepal, on location. The in-house garden became an extension of the class. Once, while I was quizzing her about the brittle dynamics of a go-getting personality, she recited from memory a sonnet of Shakespeare. On first hearing I found the sonnet rather opaque. She recited it again at a slow pace inflecting the key words in
Read more

Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Sinfulness

Image
All animals are creatures of desire; appetites would be more appropriate. They crave food when hungry, water when thirsty, safety when exposed to danger or harm. They become touch-friendly and cuddlesome when cultivated with love and care. Dogs, cats, and some birds are amenable to domesticity. Human beings are different because they have appetites and cravings which exceed physiological needs and involve body, mind, spirit and above all emotions that mutate into ambition, aspiration, obsession, even mania. Ideology, faith, manifesto, doctrines, even dogma, are ostensibly stable but volatile forms of dormant desire. Given a slight spark of provocation, they flare up into a bonfire of aggression or defence to overcome the threat. Paradoxically, this brand of consumption is equally self-consuming. On the whole, sins are impulses or acts of negativity and evil which every religion, morality, and culture deprecates with varying degrees of emphasis because they are harmful both to the sinne
Read more