Jean Paul Sartre had once quoted, “Life begins on the other side of despair”; what he meant from this saying is a long discussion that starts with the discussions on fundamentals of Existentialism – the philosophy that Sartre believed in. However, what we can understand from the saying is that to understand the life and to live it properly one has to go through a transformation – he has to experience various difficulties, problems and even despair.
Living a life that has been decided for us by our socio-economic circumstances does not really mean that we are living our lives with complete responsibility. In that case we are just puppets, dancing with the strings that are being moved by the society. In order to live a true and productive life, it is important that we should create such a life.
Creating a life means finding the true purpose of the existence and then following the same through our actions. Creating such a life is not a piece of cake; rather it requires great energy and enthusiasm. It requires, as mentioned above, a complete transformation.
The transformation can start from negating what is already taught to human beings by his surroundings. He requires to un-condition himself. The conditioning that is carried out by the society may not always be favorable for a person, and most importantly that conditioning is as per the thinking and the perspectives of others. Every person needs to discover himself, himself. He has to decide his life according to his own comprehension of his self.
During this transformation, he may feel despair; and may experience nothingness. The world may look meaningless and purposeless. The roads may look dusty and leading to nowhere. The trees may look autumn-stricken and the water may be flowing in a directionless directions. The relations may seem absurd and the friends may appear to be strangers. As Rick Warren had observed, “Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It’s a journey of discovery – there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.”
However, the important thing is not to get stuck in this despair as the life is on the other side of despair. It is not within it. This despair may prove to be a necessary evil. It may provide an opportunity to a person to rethink about his life, to rewrite its script and to rebuild his personality. As the great novelist Dostoevski had said, “Suffering is the origin of consciousness.”
Gold becomes gold after many years of suffering. It has to bear the extreme temperature and great pressure. It has to go through various processes to sparkle as it does. A seed becomes a tree after going through a long and tiresome process. It has to bear the different sorts of weather and have to extract its nutrition from the earth. Only after surviving through every thick and thin it is able to stand strong as a tree and grow flowers and fruits.
History proves that the same is true for human beings as well. The personalities that have gone through very critical circumstances have been able to stand taller as human beings.
Every human being has to go through the experience of despair if he has to discover his true self. As Soren Kierkegaard quoted in Concluding Unscientific Postscripts to the Philosophical Crumbs, “...The discrepancy is that the ethical self should be found immanently in the despair, that the individual won himself by persisting in the despair. True, he has used something within the category of freedom, choosing himself, which seem to remove the difficulty, one that presumably has not struck many, since philosophically doubting everything and then finding the true beginning goes one, two, three. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself. But if I do this, I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, whereas it is quite correct that in order to be at this point one must first have understood the existence-relation between the aesthetic and the ethical; that is to say, by being there in passion and inwardness, one surely becomes aware of the religious - and of the leap.”
Borrowed ideologies, borrowed destinations and borrowed motives can never work for an individual. Every individual is unique in what he really is. Finding that unique self will require going through the quagmire of despair, yet the great revelations are waiting on the other side. Though going through this quagmire is necessary, sticking to it is not recommended. Getting stuck in the quagmire means pitiful death. It means a useless and wasted life. The quagmire should be considered as a necessary passage to the real destination on the other side of it.
Today’s world wherein most of the people are lost in hustle and bustle and in pursuit of the materialistic gains, this is a crying need that the human beings must discover true human gifted with perfect realization of the responsibilities and understanding of the human existence. He must suffer and despair, but has to take a rebirth. He has to be born as a different human being after what he goes through. This is the only way human beings can change the world around themselves; no other way is possible today.