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The sky was pathetically blue. English is a very mercurial language. Blue is this colour we always see while looking at the sky but blue has another meaning of pathos. This another meaning of blue is marked by melancholy. However, the sky was pathetically blue and Razzak who was flanked by his yet-to-be girlfriend was sitting on a bench overlooking an azure sea with cranes and canaries warbling over the sky. An old woman carrying a pile of woods with geometrical precision – perhaps the same precision with which Protagoras, the eminent sophist of early Greek philosophy, was carrying when he bumped upon Democritus – was passing by them. A gang of children were playing football on the margin of the sea. By this time his yet-to-be girlfriend was standing by the sea and ruefully looking at the sea with an inexplicable gaze. Razzak rose to his feet and careened towards her. She was wearing a sleeveless top with her hands clutched to her bosoms. ” what are you wondering at?” He asked with a low voice, a voice informed by sullenness. “I am just wondering at the grandeur of the sea. Not in the sense of something huge and elephantine. But in a very unadulterated and pristine sense, something grand, very grand.”

They both were university students studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England. They were from Pakistan, Razzak was from Turbat and his yet-to-be girlfriend was from Islamabad. You should not ask who I am. I am only an eavesdropper prying into their personal conversation on this precise question – why do we think we are so important as human beings?

“Our philosophy teacher was teaching us the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had this discombobulated idea of time – the future as not-yet and the past the no-longer and these two negatives penetrating upon human existence.” By this time they alighted on that wooden bench and Razzak was speaking wearing a very intellectual demeanor. She was gazing at the sea thus far.

” I am keen on this question about what makes us so important and inevitably crucial in this world.” Razzak said, thinking she would say something in return.” You know Razzak, this question has been nagging me as well. I think you should speak and I will listen.” She said with an utter despondency.

” I recently happened to read a few pages of Irrational Man by William Barret. This book brings to fore an array of writers’ experiences with existential crises ranging from Baudelaire, Dostoevsky and Joyce. I will try to understand this cardinal question as regards what makes us so important drawing on a multiplicity of thinkers, writers and people with taste of life. William Barret writes while employing Heidegger’s idea of time from his book being and time: ‘ We really know time, says Heidegger, because we know we are going to die. Without this passionate realization of our mortality, time would be simply a movement of clock that we watch passively, calculating its advance – a movement devoid of human beings. Man is not, strictly speaking, in time as a body is immersed in a river that rushes by. Rather, time is in him; his existence is temporal through and through, from inside out. His moods, his care and unconcern and his anxiety, guilt and conscience – all are saturated with time.” The importance of humans could be understood by the sense of death as expressed by Heidegger – that we will die one day and humans are but temporality.

”Nonetheless, as you know, Merh Jan, Plato had this idiosyncratic idea of essentialism, the hackneyed idea or in that sense essence precedes existence and we all are destined to something. Plato’s idealism purports that the substantive reality around us is only an ephemeral and colored reflection of a higher truth. He had developed two discrete yet contiguous worlds – the world of unchanging ideas and the world of changing physical objects. Plato crucially argued that this physical world is really a sleight of hand and our collective daftness has tricked us hook, line and sinker. The most illustrative example of this real-unreal dialectics is Plato’s allegory of the cave.

” By stark contrast, existentialism is the strident philosophy of existence preceding essence most probably pioneered by Soren Kierkegaard. Later developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and reached its apotheosis with Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. This philosophy utterly pooh-poohs the idealism of Plato and Immanuel Kant and postulates that humans alone decide what they are to be and there is no real world that Plato envisaged. This was more radical and vociferous inasmuch as this proffered a meaning when Second World War hit the last nail to the coffin of Europeans and everyone was dejected, surreal and feeling estranged. Existentialism almost became a fashion and everyone was turned on, fervid and strenuous. The most essential work or the magnum opus of existentialism is, Being and Nothingness, written by Sartre. Existentialism is humanism is his other trenchant work which answers the malicious allegations put against Sartre and his philosophy. Sartre writes in his treatise Existentialism is a humanism: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give life a meaning.” France was on the eve of doom when Sartre wrote this treatise and Europeans were forfeiting their importance as human beings. As these lines tumbled forth everyone was filled with exuberance and joy. Sartre seems to throw the baby out with bathwater when he writes countervailing idealism of Plato et al :”Man is nothing but what he makes of himself.” There are a plethora of such intriguing and sort of mind-boggling assertions by Sartre.

But this does not answer our simple and least of all the most significant question: what makes us so important? You see, Mehr Jan, we are egregiously polluting our ecosystem, pulverizing Marine life. The factories are dumping all their non-degradable wastages and discharging sewage and runoff into the ocean, all because we think we are in some particular sense more important than all other creatures of the world. For me this is little less than a cardinal or a cosmic sin.”

”I suppose I am not strewing you with my pell-mell philosophical musings and boring you with my utterly ineffable things” After a long monologue Razzak said to her. She was not bored and was eager to hearken with raptness to Razzak. By this time the sun was low on the horizon of the sea and the gang of children were nowhere to be seen. ” No Razzak, you read more than I do. Please continue and imbue me with the emeralds of knowledge.”

” That is so nice of you. You know I recently read an interview of Yuval Noah Harari who is unremittingly stealing the shows of debates conducted on centrality of humanity, the nitty-gritty of our question. He writes, ” previously philosophy was a kind of luxury: You can indulge in it or not. Now you really need to answer crucial philosophical questions about what humanity is or the nature of the good in order to decide what to do with, for example, new biotechnologies.” Perhaps that is why I was drawing on all those philosophers. I wager our question is a philosophical question and only philosophy can answer it but we can out of generosity go to science as well to cajole a few answers. In the same paragraph Harari writes:” Also, my most central idea is simple. It’s the primacy of fictions, that to understand the world you need to take stories seriously. The story in which you believe shapes the society that you create.” Per Harari everything we believe in and subscribe to frenetically are all figments of our sanguine imagination. He believes humanism is a piece of fiction as well as liberalism is a piece of fiction. There is nothing written in our blood and veins or something sealed in our hypothalamus that pigeonhole us as something extraordinary and unique. He believes it is our vocational inter-subjective response that peddles ideologies which we rejoice to the core. Humans have no importance per se. As the late cosmologist Carl Sagan noted, seeing firstly the picture of our Earth far from the universe as a pale blue dot: Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” This suggests the futility of humans touting a cosmic significance to their being.

”But I don’t think so. This cannot be a plausible answer. What makes us so enormously distinct and unique must be premised upon something much more convincing. I am more convinced with these types of questions propounded by Kazuo Ishiguro in his most recent novel, Klara and the Sun, where quite in middle of the novel in a conversation someone asks this redolent question that filled me with blues: ” “Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?” Perhaps the heart could be a reliable place to brood on and think: could this be something to which we could boast our importance. Not simply the heart which siphon off blood into veins but the human heart which gets hurt when admonished and which gets ebullient when some extends to it an olive branch.

Many critical thinkers opine that language, intelligence and power of making stories presuppose an especial niche for human beings. We think, speak and can cooperate and this makes us so much more important than all other animals. But science says Orangutans are amongst the most intelligent primates. Orangutans can use sophisticated tools to construct for themselves sleeping places and other small things. Their learning abilities are flabbergasting. Scientists even suggest there may be discrete cultures in their population.

In addition to that, Franz De Waal, a Dutch primatologist, did an amazing experiment to exude the emotional side of animals with two Capuchin monkeys placed side by side in a cage. The monkeys were trained to give stones and in return receive bland cucumbers. One day the nurse gives a cucumber to one monkey and grapes to another. The first monkey protests this inequity and bursts into a tantrum rattling the cage in rage just like a small child. ”

” Wow, that experiment is just awesome.” She chimed in after a long interval, as though she was in a reverie. ” Yes, indeed. That really is amazing.”

The sun was no more to be seen, only the crimson view of the horizon with a grand sea. No birds. No human trace. Only the whooshing gusts of strong wind disheveling the well-kempt hairs of Merh Jan. I must confess that Mehr Jan was a very unpretentious girl – you could speak hours on end to her and she would listen to you like a rapt audience enthralled by the grandeur of the speaker.

” I think it is getting too late and we must go now.” Mehr Jan stood up and ran her fingers through her velvety hairs. ” Yes, we must go now.” Razzak replied with an exhausted voice. ” You know this topic is very painful and partly enigmatic. The question what truly makes us so important and unique. I guess we must keep on talking, exploring and exchanging ideas on these questions.” Razzak said.

My heart was breaking and I was about to sob when I saw Razzak kissing the forehead of Mehr Jan and embracing her like a parched forest embraces rain after a long time. For me this is what makes us so unique. Perhaps tears make us unique. And this very moment when two young students are thinking about such a strange and unanswerable phenomenon of life makes us unique. But again we must not rely on these. We must keep moving on and on.

The writer is a student, based in Turbat. He Tweets at @shahabakram6 and can be reached at shahabakram0852@gmail.com