Being and Becoming: Essays and Aphorisms on Post-Industrial Existentialism
Abdullah Ali Khan
About this book
Being & Becoming is a work of philosophy on consciousness, knowledge, truth, suffering, and the conditions of human existence in the post-industrial age. Drawing upon the epistemological and metaphysical insights of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others, it examines the foundations of modern thought while confronting the assumptions that underlie contemporary materialism and the prevailing understanding of the self.
Through a collection of essays and aphorisms, Abdullah Ali Khan explores the limits of subjective experience, the struggle between the individual and the crowd, and the enduring search for meaning in the modern world. Bridging empirical science with metaphysical inquiry, the text presents a stark analysis of the underlying friction between perceived reality and the absolute.
Read a little of the book.
What makes us most miserable is our idea that we are supposed to be happy. What makes us most miserable is not the suffering itself but the belief, absorbed so early we cannot remember receiving it, that we were not supposed to suffer, that happiness was the default condition from which suffering represents a deviation […] Remove the entitlement and the suffering remains but becomes bearable, becomes even, on the far side of it, meaningful.
We do not love the past because it was better but because it is finished, because its beauties and its disasters have already revealed their size and can no longer surprise us, because the dead cannot disappoint us further and the younger version of ourselves, preserved now in memory, will never again do anything embarrassing.
…faith is not the acceptance of a well-evidenced proposition but the orientation of the whole self toward something it cannot fully see and chooses, in full awareness of the risk, to move toward anyway. […] trying to prove God objectively is not the path to faith but, in the most precise sense, its destruction, for the mathematically certain man has no need of trust, and without trust there is no relation. […] God was never meant to be an object of proof but an object of love, which is always, by its nature, a subjective and agonising and entirely personal risk.
…the sum of these accumulated parts amounts to nothing fixed, but resolves into zero, a grand nullification, and yet, I speak of myself in reference to my 'self' as though I am fully aware of what it is, or of what I am. Nay, I find that what I am inclined to call my most authentic self is only that which remains most obscure, most distant, most diluted, and that which is nearest to me in experience proves least graspable in reflection.
Turn through the pages.
A few pages from the book, so you can see how it reads before you buy.
