THE ESSENCE OF LIFE

THE GODDESS OF DANCE and her guardian angel
Management at Middlesex University in the UK plan to slash the philosophy department, but the students have decided to resist. I also signed a petition that has now over 13,000 signatures in putting pressure on management to back off the department of philosophy. I have never studied philosophy, but what I know is that my life would be dreary if it was not for the knowledge I learnt from some of the intelligent historical philosophers.

What is philosophy?

1. Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline.
2. Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods.
3. The disciplines presented in university curriculums of science and the liberal arts, except medicine, law, and theology.

The first time I came across the name Karl Marx was sometime in 2004 when I was researching for my essay on Socio-Political perspectives. I was angry at the way health care was being privatized and commodified and also worried about what that meant to third world countries, but none of the books on our reading list argued against this daylight robbery of health care by big business. As far as I was concerned, there was no logic for privatizing the NHS here in the UK, more so under the Labour government. But what infuriated me most was the laissez fair attitude the lecturers took despite the outcry from nurses who found all these changes impracticable because they made it impossible to give quality of care to patients when managers counted such care in monetary terms rather than health needs. Fortunately, I had also just joined the SWP and this gave me access to books and literature written by Karl Marx. What this knowledge did was enable me to understand the importance of philosophy and philosophical critical thinking in relation to the material world.

Out of the above three definitions of philosophy, I was more into the first one; i.e.

1. Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline.

I have never been one who is easily indoctrinated or brain washed despite growing up under the heavy hand of Catholicism. Maybe it is the Catholic teachings that made me into what I am, i.e. I always wanted answers to my here and now, I wanted solutions to my problems in the here and now and to know the truth about life that counteracted the religious indoctrination of suffering on earth so as to die and go to heaven. However, growing up under apartheid made me like most people who are deliberately deprived of a right to live their lives the way they want to, or as in the case of Middlesex University, deprived of an education of one’s choice and that made me look up to something else for answers. But I soon lost faith in divine intervention after witnessing one tragedy after another in my early 20s. My life was one of sadness and grief hence my quest for education therefore has its roots in my inquisitiveness regarding human life, its purpose, suffering and sadness. One thing I held onto throughout my life and its tragedies was faith, my belief that there is more to life than my physical body is what kept me going. Strangely, the more I despaired about life, the more faith I had in my belief. This is different from divine intervention in the sense that I believed I had the power to stand up to what ever befell me.

It is ok to be sad or experience sorrow or unhappiness because of a tragic incident, something out of your control has triggered it, i.e. death of a loved one, illness, rejection, loss. But to be sad or unhappy because one just feels sad or unhappy is a subject that has defied scientific research and the best science and pharmaceuticals can come up with is medication to counteract the sadness. Psychologist are more in tune with feelings of a person – hence delve more deeper into a sad person’s life and lifestyle with a view of dealing with the cause of sadness. Counselling does a marvelous job for some people as I personally experienced the benefit from it in my attempt to come to terms with the death of my loved ones. For those people who can identify the cause of their sadness, counselling is an invaluable source of self help. Most people, mainly those in the medical and related professions know that sadness of varied degrees afflict most people than any other illnesses; even afflicting children and young adults, with some of them being treated for one form of sadness or another. Some people are just sad; others go a step further and suffer from mental health from mild to acute depression to other serious mental health problems. The question I struggled to come to terms with for a long time when I came to the UK was why people in the world of plenty as the UK suffer from sadness? I was sad throughout my childhood because of the poverty and suffering of my people. I set out from an early age to do my best to help them. I did my best until they all died on me. Whilst I was busy helping them, all my sadness seemed to evaporate.

What the students and lecturers are doing at Middlesex University is a testament to Karl Marx’s familiar philosophical argument; i.e. “emancipation of the working class by the working class”. Their slogan ‘The University is a factory, strike and occupy’ says it all. On the contrary, what I was trying to do for my village and my people up until 2003 is not the same as what these students are doing; it was a solo crusade which was bound to fail dismally unless other people came on board. But whilst I was doing it, it made me feel good despite the struggles and hard work to raise the money for an ever demanding population. I kept on going because I needed that good feel factor that I felt when I was helping them. It filled the void in my life. But it is not joy or even happiness that I felt because I was tired all the time from working hard and thinking hard on my own. I was like a woman with a brood of children that she alone was responsible for. I loved my people and have fond memories of my village and I wanted to help them get out of poverty like I have done, but they drained me financially, physically and spiritually. So, despite my disappointment at the premature end of my project and the loss of thousands of my money, I feel a sense of relief.

This brings me back to why I feel sad if I don’t help others. If there is one thing I did well once I settled in the UK, away from my childhood poverty, is that I set out to find an answer as to why people are sad. I was sad in my childhood because of my childhood poverty and the suffering of my people. I felt good when I started working and making plans about how to get my people out of their poverty. I got very sad at the loss of my loved ones because they left a void in my life, but I got even suicidal when I realized that my project to build them a hospital had failed in 2003. I can trace my behaviour of kindness and self-sacrifice to my childhood and I positively criticize my mother for that. That is what she did all her life and I aspired to be like her. But why do I feel good when I help others and sad when I don’t? For instance, I can never walk away from injustice even if it means my life or livelihood is affected by it.

To start off, religion failed to indoctrinate me in its belief of a heavenly god. But what I seem to have in me are the words or teachings of those philosophers whose words and deeds I believe in, namely Jesus Christ. But it does not matter how much I read or recite those words, they never give me that good feel factor that I get when I put those words in deeds by helping others. All I can say is that this feeling of sadness that afflicts most of us even those who have nothing to be sad about has defied the scientific world. Some people feel sad; they do nothing about it, progress in their sadness until it becomes an illness. I suppose that in my case my sadness was a reflection of the sadness and suffering that I see among my people that also made me sad – hence my aborted solo crusade to help them made me feel suicidal. On the other hand, other sad people choose medication which I must admit, helps them tremendously. But I believe I chose self- emancipation, emancipating myself from what made me sad. I had no reason to be sad in these past 20 years because I worked very hard to build my career and at the same time improved my social life in the UK. But it is only now that I believe that my lifelong sadness has turned into joy for the first time in my life. This quote captures my experience and what I mean by this joy that one gets from self-emancipation:

“Joy is not simply your personal egoistic happiness; nor is making others happy at the expense of your own happiness. You and others delighting together, you and others becoming happy together – this is the Mystic law” Nichiren Daishonin in Lotus Sutra April 28 1253.

Note:
Daishonin followed in the footsteps of the founder of Buddhism, Buddha Shakyamuni who lived in Nepal some 2,500 years ago who set out to understand the inescapable sufferings of every human being, birth, aging, sickness and death and the means by which these sufferings could be overcome. Like Jesus Christ, Buddha Shakyamuni is said to have started his quest at the age of 30 leaving behind his princely sheltered life and went on to preach his wisdom all around India for 50 years.

What strikes me in these teachings, be it Buddha, Jesus Christ or even the Hindu philosophy is their consensus on the centrality of human beings. In the original Buddhist teachings of Shakyamuni and Daishonin, the teachings strove to awaken people to the impermanence of all phenomena in order to free them from the sufferings that arise from egoistic attachment to things that the passage of time will destroy or render meaningless and that there is an innate and universal truth known as the Buddha nature, the manifestation of which enables one to enjoy absolute happiness and to act with boundless compassion. This teaches the realities of daily life and which naturally encourages an active engagement with others and with the whole of human society. The Hindu philosophy also postulates that everything in reality stems from self or soul and matter; creative energy. Jesus Christ confirms this by saying that the kingdom of god is inside you and captures human beings as the father, the son and the Holy Ghost; sexist maybe, but the reality is that all these teachings point me to the understanding that this Mystic law embodies the human body, society and the universe. But I believe that it is only those who have connected the soul with matter who create this energy; i.e. where the manifestation of Buddha/soul is evident to the universe who benefit from this creative energy, this creative energy that is able to bring about joy when one delights and shares his/her happiness with others. This is the oneness preached by Jesus Christ. This is what I embraced to reach this oneness that gives me joy.

What I was doing for my people was making them happy at the expense of my own happiness. What I was getting from that was not joy, but simple egoistic happiness.

There is another definition of philosophy and I guess this one applies to people like Karl Marx:

2. An investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods. Jesus Christ, Buddha Shakyamuni and other Hindu gods like Krishna were driven by love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline. I believe Marx and others like him were driven by people’s unhappiness in relation to the material world. Unlike Jesus, Buddha, Krishna etc who are regarded by their followers as deities or gods, Marx’s philosophy is based on this material world and its effects on human beings. From the little I know of Marx’s background is that he was not from a poor background. I suspect therefore that what he saw was injustice and its relationship to the sadness and suffering of those who were poor. He saw the relationship between those who were exploiting others and the exploited in the material sense and so he set to find out answers. He wrote Capital and related literature in an attempt to analyse how the exploitative system that was driven by capital was dividing society into the have and have not’s. It is this philosophical analysis by Karl Marx that enabled me to bridge the gap between my philosophical thinking to how I can get the answers to my problems in the here and now, i.e. the answers to why there is so much poverty and injustice in this world of plenty and how to fight back.

Take my little village where I grew up for instance; nearly everyone in my village was unemployed, had minimum education or none. Most of them were peasants with a few cows, donkeys, sheep, goats, pigs and this barren land where they toiled from sunrise to sunset just to have enough food from one year to another. A few miles away there were white farmers who had been allocated the most fertile soil and had irrigation schemes in case of drought. In case of drought, my people had to depend on one form of aid or another and had to travel miles to fetch water. They had no perception of what Marx is talking about. However, no one I knew died from hunger as people shared the little they had. The few that moved to town and got jobs were highly looked upon even though they were paid next to nothing. I don’t know what it was like over 2,000 years ago when people like Jesus Christ and the Buddha turned against their lives of luxury to seek answers to the sadness of this world. What I know is that had I not come across Marx’s philosophy that enabled me to understand the root causes of the hostilities of this otherwise wonderful world we live in, I might have killed someone out of sheer frustration. The irony of all this is that whilst I was reading all this literature and attending all study days run by the SWP in my attempt to understand what Marx was talking about I had all the wonderful strange weirdoes and deranged nincompoops plotting my demise. It’s ironic because they did the same to Jesus Christ.

What is happening at Middlesex University must be taken seriously as warning bells by all those who aspire to critically analyse this oppressive system that we live under. Marx’s writing, unlike Jesus Christ’s stories has not been distorted by anyone. All rationale people know that this is the only world we will ever know or live in. If there is a heaven somewhere else, none of us is going to walk there in our physical bodies. Marx’s literature is now easily accessible for all – more so those who embark on further education on critical analysis of this world and its antagonisms. My 3rd and last definition of philosophy pertains to universities like Middlesex i.e.

3. Philosophy as the disciplines presented in university curriculums of science and the liberal arts, except medicine, law, and theology.

I believe there is a liberal nature of how philosophy is taught in the UK, and this allows individuals undertaking philosophy either at postgraduate or PhD a wider scope of looking and questioning this material world we live in. This is obviously a threat to those who disagree with Marx’s ideology – an ideology based on emancipation of human kind from the yolks of capital. Be it David Cameron and Clegg, New Labour and Spotamatist, any government under capitalism has one aim and one aim only, to squeeze the working class people who produce all the wealth of the world bone dry. This is the time for all working class people to stand up, not only in support of the philosophy department in Middlesex University, but to put Karl Marx’s ideology into practice. Yes we need philosophy departments, but if we are living in the here and now, life is too short and too complex to deprive oneself of its joys by popping happy pills instead of fighting against the cause.

My gratitude to those who accepted me when I was at my weakest and saddest!