“You are a philosopher,
Dr Johnson,” said Oliver Edwards. “I
have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how,
cheerfulness was always breaking in.”
Philosophers are grim
creatures. Imagine Immanuel Kant with a
smile on his lips. It would be easier to
visualise Jesus cracking an adult joke about King David’s sexcapade with
Bathsheba. From Descartes to
Wittgenstein, the whole lot of them were damn serious about strangling the
conceited bourgeois spirit of their time.
And they all failed, each one of them, inevitably. Because the triumph of humanity is the
triumph of the middle class pretensions and hypocrisy.
There are no more
philosophers left in the world. The
hypocrisy of the middle class has killed the philosophers. Nietzsche would have said that the
philosophers died laughing, laughing at the caricatures that walked about wearing
expensive branded suits and smelling of cheap morality sold from all sorts of
pulpits.
Oliver Edwards went through
life without experiencing it really. So
cheerfulness frothed in him as it did in King David while watching Bathsheba
taking bath in the moonlight. 21st
century is the century of King Davids and Bathshebas. Not of philosophers with their off-putting
melancholic cerebrations. It is the age
of godmen who sell happiness in yogic concoctions and art of living
conventions.
We live in a world where happiness can be packaged in silver gold and platinum schemes and where people buy such schemes. There are even sachets of happiness for the poor! They sell hypocrisy and we buy hypocrisy and that is how the economy flows from the poor to the rich, making rich richer and poor dalit-ers!!
ReplyDeleteYou left out Diogenes. That man lived his life with no pretension and we can see how happy he was.
I left out the ancients intentionally. Even Socrates with his apparent severity had a sense of humour.
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