The concept of "Ananda" in the postmodern quest for meaning

This study mainly deals with issues such as how the teaching of knowing one self and self-management, which is the first intellectual commandment of ancient philosophy, relates to human and meaning problems in the postmodern period that emerged after modernism. Postmodernism, which etimologically means after modernism, is a concept mostly used in the field of art, but when problematized in terms of meaning, it is characterized by the re-evaluation of substitute values, the multiplicity of meanings or the loss of meaning in the context of the thoughts of contemporary philosopher. In this period, especially the skepticism towards all comprehensive meta-narratives that contain certainty has made the problem of loss of meaning a major problem in the context of postmodernism in the 21st century. Although the problem of loss of meaning is not a subject specific to the postmodern period, we can also see intellectual activities on this subject in ancient civilizations. While examining these subjects, we find the doctrines that we use as a guide in order to explain the situation of man and the problem of meaning in the postmodern period in Indian philosophy. We can see that the teaching of knowing oneself is dominant in the Upanishads, which constitute the first written examples of this philosophical system. Based on this teaching, individuals experience life not with a single, meta- narrative but by determining their own paths in the light of a guiding teaching. Since the Indian philosophical system opens the door to pluralism and allows individuals to construct the truth with their own uniqueness in life instead of constructing it with a meta-narrative, it also has parallels with postmodernism, which constitutes the basic line of our benefiting from ancient Indian doctrines. The necessity of reconstructing the meaning with this parallelism we mentioned has been explained with the concept of ananda\moksha within the framework of Indian philosophy and this issue constitutes another line of our study. The state of ananda, which occurs when the concepts of artha, kama, dharma, moksha are considered together, allows the individual to exist in the areas of freedom, pleasure and individuality, while at the same time it contains ontological existence patterns. In this way, while postmodernism prioritizes the concepts of individual and Freedom, it provides an alternative interpretation opportunity