PHILOSOPHY POEM HANDBOOK

To 71 pages of Philosophy Poems, we've added 15 pages of our own philosophical comments, to expand on the themes and context.

from Descarte

"I think,
So I do not sink
Into what I cannot control.
I throw tow lines
     onto the surface of things.
My mind measures the immensities
     with my propensities and intensities.

"I am the pilot of my ship,
Like an embedded controller chip.
The world can turn against me
     at any time.
My instruments – my words,
     my vowels and consonants,
These are my constants,
     my castanets,
          my casting nets.
Only these can save me."

                    • • •

from Empiricism

Skepticism does not wow us over
     with its ways,
For each person is king
     in an empty place,
Where other minds are but landfill,
Where each mind scrapes
     on the landscape of the world,
And subsists on scraps
     left by other minds,
Whose existence is denied,
     but through their effects
Is implied.

                    • • •

from Kant

We cannot know
The real nature of what we perceive,
     the thing-in-itself,
          unknowable to us,
Causes a thirst,
     we can never quench,
For we only know things
     in space and time,
          not things-in-themselves.

However we romance
     the thing-in-itself,
Or how fast we dance
     with our instruments or senses,
It will not cease to beckon us
     with wonder,
          this world we cannot know.

Humans can never know.
     what persists outside of space and time
          and the categories of the mind.
We meet the world through our
     perceptions and conceptions
But its real nature is secluded from us,
     it has eluded us.

We are fools for the world,
We face the world all time
But when we try to really see,
We fall on our faces.
The mystery entices and torments us.
Post-Kantian German idealists,
     Fichte, Schelling and Hegel,
Do not let this matter rest,
And with them we will later explore
     the thing-in-itself some more.

                    • • •

from Existentialism

The existentialists reject
     as spectacle,
German speculative idealism.
We are to focus our spectacles
On choices born of realism,
     not idealism.
Existentialism empties the self
     of essence,
So it can be filled
     with potions and portions
Of each person’s choosing.

We are to choose freely,
     not from habits or fixed attitudes,
Not from the has bin
     of stale necessities,
But from the bin
     of fresh possibilities.
Will our choices feed us,
     or stuff us with old
          dead stuff? ...

As with the foods
     on our plates,
So with the moral choices
     in our lives.