Skip to main content

Hope and some faith too




Like Vaclav Havel, I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist.  Everything does not end well.  Nor does everything end badly either.  I have felt the constant surge of hope in my breast that things will improve.  Like, maybe we will have a good political leader who can unite the nation while preserving its endless variety.  Or that poverty will be eradicated and people will live with dignity. 

“Life without hope is an empty, boring, and useless life,” said Havel. We cannot strive for anything without a fair share of hope within us.  However, one of my favourite authors, Albert Camus, derided hope as “the last item in Pandora’s box.”  Pandora’s box brought all the evils to mankind, according to Greek mythology.  Zeus kept the last evil, hope, hidden in the box.  Hope is the greatest source of trouble, philosopher Nietzsche had argued and Camus borrowed the argument.  Hope makes people anticipate an ultimate reward like heaven.  Such hope diminishes the value of this life here on earth.

Life is a pain for quite many people.  Camus compared it to the laborious process of rolling a massive boulder uphill only to have it being pushed down by the antagonistic deity like in the case of Sisyphus.  I have found much consolation in Camus’s philosophy of the absurd.  Life is absurd.  Our contemporary world which spends more wealth and energy on breeding hatred and perpetrating violence on fellow human beings is the most absurd one that any ‘rational’ creature could have created.

Sisyphus, an ancient painting

Camus’s solution is revolt.  Like Sisyphus who challenged the gods, we must challenge the absurdities of life and live in constant revolt arising from our intellectual integrity.  But I think such a life can be very painful.  I wonder if Sisyphus could ever smile.  I can only imagine Sisyphus as growling at the god who made him push the boulder for eternity.  I admire his grit and determination.  But I would love him if he could smile as he walked down the hill with the challenge burning in his breast.

Hope can bring that smile.  Camus would call it an abdication of integrity.  When you know that you have no escape from the boulder, hope is out of place.  Hope is an illusion.  Hope is an evil.

That’s true for Sisyphus.  But in our actual life the boulder is only a metaphor.  There is always the possibility of the boulder reaching the summit successfully.  Otherwise mankind would not have conquered so many peaks of success.  That’s why I incline more towards Havel than Camus.  Hope and some accompanying faith in ourselves and in the potential of mankind for goodness are essential for retaining the smile on our lips.

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniMay 9, 2017 at 9:05 AM

    This is where the confusion comes. The trouble comes when we have to chose a certain belief to lead this life.

    Of course suicide is never the solution when one realizes that life is meaningless. But to counter it what can one choose to live with? Hope or revolt?

    I believe hope is something only a truely optimistic person can opt to live with. For the rest revolt might come us a solution.

    Living in hope is pleasant but a delusion. Living with revolt is painful but pragmatic. Living in ingnorance is however a bliss.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 9, 2017 at 5:27 PM

      Isn't the entire life a big paradox? You've mentioned a few of the inevitable paradoxes: hope and delusion, revolt and pain. Ignorance is bliss but at least some people refuse to embrace ignorance. So we have to suffer. We can mitigate the suffering with a pinch of hope which, as I argued in the post, is ok since we do attain success once in a while.

      The more perfect a philosophical system, the less useful it is in actual life, I think. Camus made a neat system which satisfies the intellect but fails to tackle certain human aspirations.

      Delete
  2. UnknownMay 10, 2017 at 2:31 PM

    Faith and hope help to keep the dust of negativity off of our glasses of outlook and perception. Though one might remain aware of the reality around it is healthy to have a optimistic outlook to keep our own system free of the poison of the world. A person with an optimistic outlook remains healthy for society and nature at large.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 10, 2017 at 8:13 PM

      That's true. But optimism shouldn't be blind. Secondly, thinkers of the calibre of Camus and Havel look at optimism as well as pessimism more deeply than an ordinary person.

      Delete
  3. UnknownMay 11, 2017 at 7:44 PM

    Havel yes but camus needs to dive down further. I love the last line of your piece sir.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
16 comments
Read more

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more