Adhocism

A post-modern man really has no basis (man free from foundation). Naturally, he thinks that words are free from meanings. The post-modern trend firmly believes that there cannot be fixed senses and nuances for a term or sign. The meaning of a term or a word is being determined by the context at which it appears. Likewise, the existence of a man has been determined by the context in which he appears. There is a religious man in the place of worship, an economic man in the market, a political man in the legislature and an aesthetic man when he enjoys a piece of poem. The point to be noted is that all these contexts and experiences leave undeletable marks on him, because there is no foundation in man. A man devoid of foundation is a hollow man and a ‘stuffed man’. Such a man cannot keep any integrity. The feeling is that man is the disintegrated fragments of experiences spreading over innumerable contexts in which he is destined to reach. This also is a play of maya because it conceals the fact that there is an integral whole in him which really is the pivotal point. This really is the crisis to be experienced by everyone in a society and it has been known as adhocism. Adhocism is an approach which believes that one need not think about a permanent solution, because there is no permanence and all problems are temporary; hence they can be solved on an adhoc basis. Adhocism has been entertained by the management experts as a powerful technique to get control over the market. The market economy, the resultant philosophy of post-modernism and the adhocism adopted to solve issues regarding the existence of man paved way for the emergence of the conflicting one and the same person having divergent interests. Post-modernism says that there is not one man but many men in accordance with the changing contexts and interactions of man with such contexts. A man in the market and man in a place of worship are not one and the same man but are different in different contexts. Naturally his interests, attitudes, actions and reactions may be changed. Hence, a person is able to adopt two different moral attitudes in the said two contexts. But how a person having specific name and form can adopt difference up to the level of having contradictory nature of moral norms is a question to be answered properly. A man in the market is concerned with his own profit alone, while a man in a place of worship has to pray for one and all including his friends and foes. That is, a person who stands for himself in a market prays for the benefit of one and all is quite contradictory. A man of contradiction cannot experience peace and harmony. His life would be in a world of uncertainty. Hence, he has to experience a sense of psychic imbalance. This may be one of the reasons for the sharp increase of patients suffering from hypertension and diabetes. Both these diseases are the results of the metabolic imbalances of the body and they are the psychosomatic diseases generally referred to as ‘tension’. Everyone is suffering from tension. Man in a tensed mood is cursed to endure anxiety. Therefore, the 21st century man who celebrates technological victory over organic unity has to pay heavy price for his ignorance that man cannot make a survival without organic unity. The very idea that man is a heap of fragments of experiences and he is an organic whole inseparable from the context he lives is due to the influence of maya. So maya appears in different contexts having different dimensions. The main concern of advaita* philosophy is to find methods to overcome maya in order to experience stability.