This is a 'genealogy' of those parts of Western (and hence the world's most important) thought which seem crucial to me. There is no place for Marx (a minor dead-end derivative of Hegel) or Freud (a mere artist rather than a philosopher/enquirer) - and certainly none for post- and post-post-modernists. Incidentally, I too am a mere artist; I do not have a great opinion of the breed.
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A man is many-minded
And so the first philosopher:
To start, in myths was blinded,
A butter-tongued récitateur.
Democritus set atoms
A’flinging like the abacus,
From this came self-hug patterns
Which spun themselves in knots to us.
And Heraclitus, grim,
Proclaimed knee-deep in matter’s river
That all was flux; for him
Life was a fugue upon the zither.
Parmenides dismissed
Such airs convinced that nothing changed;
What was was one, a cyst
Of being, unmotioned, unimpinged.
Then Plato’s pandect thought
Put men in caves and Forms above;
The sooth-eyed few, he taught,
Should the Republic’s herd betruth.
But Aristotle knelt,
Stared starkly at the gist of things,
Pondered why sweet herbs smelt
And why ground-running birds had wings.
Elsewhere rough Moses marched
His tribes to swell in Nebo’s view;
Milk, honey for the parched,
But also Law, thorn of the True.
Christ brought to crux all this,
Stretched-armed seizer of times and place,
Purified the world’s kiss,
Its what and why in His bruised face.
Later, Aquinas wove
Tart Gospels and philosophy
To show the struts of Love
Which pinned Creation’s jewel and sty.
At length, Descartes’ “I am”
Proclaimed the individual,
That thought machine whose frame
Was mind-geared through the pineal.
And Newton turned the planets
And the dropped apple in his mind,
Quantified all their habits
And mass to clockwork laws consigned.
Came Hegel, dour like snow,
Convinced the world’s work had a goal,
That man and thought must grow
To the self-knowing of world soul.
Darwin exploded all;
His finches, flags of fecund chance,
Self-grew through push and pull
Of parlous food and hot-flesh wants.
So Nietzsche screamed that God
And man’s mere rational thought are dead,
And Zarathustra trod
With Will on good and evil’s head.
Then Einstein, placid-eyed,
Equation-led, made relative
Space-time, and cosmos-wide
Linked each to all with light-speed’s weave.
Heidegger rescued Being,
Enworlded and defined by death;
Through truth-told self-descrying
Its thrown work is both wreath and sheaf.
But Bohr in deep-root physics
Found quanta, waves, shape-shifting states;
The probable had fidgets
And dodged when probed by lab-men’s lights.
Last, Monod made summation
That man is thinking chemistry,
A freak absurd mutation
Lacking all point or destiny.
So, in a thrash of atoms
Torn by unchanging ruthless flux,
Man wrestles in the fathoms
Seeking a handhold on the rocks.
Among the dunes a cave,
Inside, a shelf with Cross and rose:
What makes the world behave,
Blind force or Mind? The hermit chose.
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© February 2016
