The Reason for Life

What do some of the most brilliant, most gifted, and most original thinkers of the world say about the purpose of human life?Very few twenty-century scientists made as a lasting influence on modern society as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Physicists routinely use the theories Einstein developed a century ago to analyse and comprehend cosmological and quantum phenomena. Similarly, some of the vital models contemporary psychologists routinely apply in order to explain psychosexual developments and human psyches are credited to Freud. Perhaps less known to the general public is the magnitude of influence Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy had on both Einstein and Freud. Einstein once declared: "Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss." Freud too ranked Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov alongside the works of Shakespeare in terms of its literary significance. Tolstoy had likewise influenced Einstein and Freud. Two of the subjects, in which they held a common intereste with comparable magnitude, were God and the purpose of human life. All of them, without exception, had passionately been occupied by and written and talked extensively about these subjects. The purpose of this book is to closely examine the beliefs of the quartet based on the books and articles they produced over a span of many years. The author has made a great effort to make their views as comprehensible as possible for the general reader without diluting or oversimplifying them.

Waltenegus Dargie is a graduate of the Nazareth Technical College (BSc in Electrical Engineering, 1997), the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (MSc in Electrical Engineering, 2002) and the Technical University of Dresden (PhD in Computer Engineering, 2006). He also got his Habilitation (the highest academic achievement in Germany) in 2010. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Computer Networks at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. He has extensively published on computer networks, wireless networks, and self-managing systems. In his free time, he enjoys reading classical literature and competing in long distance running (half-marathon). He published his first historical novel, The Eunuch and the King’s Daughter, in 2005.