thoughts on college no. 2

there's a guy who stands
solitary on a beach and
the dreadful thing is
it's not so much that he
approaches the water
as the water inches
closer to his toes
his feet are blocks of
dried and dull cement
the sand long since like an
antswarm has been
devouring his feet
the sand is a fact
he is a grain of sand
abraham's sand
but even facts can be effaced
and the comfortable order upheaved
by the geist of change
the facts of sand in the horizon of his vision
are gone and eaten up
with greater velocity than
the sand had earlier concerning his feet
and the fluctus aequoris
begin to reveal their threat
the old japanese painting
of the monster tidalwave
and inside the guy
the germs of fear
and of despair
and of seasickness crack
open and
open and
open and
out shrieks suffusing rapidly
the nauseating burden of
responsibility

but there is such a rider who
the foamy horses of the sea
who on the backs leviathan
in easy calm yet glorious rides
and of the man's dead feet shall be
reviver not of feet alone
but of each sinew and the wave
of change himself does spur not for
a drowning void of meaning but a
death and undeath into life

My First Poem in German(!)

Disclaimer: Not to be taken seriously. Thank you very much. Should Roi stumble on this, he should not be offended, because nonsense should not offend.

Behold, peasants! I have written my first scatological doggerel verse:

Roi ist ein
Fett Regenschirm,
Wer Würmer
Isst, und furzt.

Which is, being interpreted:

Roi is a
Fat umbrella,
Who worms
does eat, and farts.

Which is, being evaluated, a horrible translation of a frightfully inane piece of poetry.

Herr Johann is traumatized.

thoughts on college no. 1

yesterday I had a gig it lasted the whole afternoon up to eight p.m.
before that a family friend texted that I was accepted at one of the two philippine colleges I applied to
when I got home after the gig I checked the college's website and yes I saw it for myself Bernales, Yuri... Status: Accepted
I checked fb and a few friends had greeted me and the internet did not cooperate and I wasn't able to respond to the congratulations yuri until around ten o'clock I probably looked like a snob and when do I not look like a snob
but I'm not elated and I feel I should be why am I not
did I expect this yes I did
I had trouble with the other phil college and I had no trouble with this one and today I have problems with the other and this one accepted me
am I scared maybe
it's the end of the tunnel and I have the faintest of ideas of what awaits me on the other side
"for he will command his angels concerning you"

ὥστε φιλόσοφος: Part 1—Introduction

I planned to enroll at a nearby international school to study epic literature and ancient Greek philosophy, but the plan fell through and here I am, stuck at home. However, the good thing about home is that it’s virtually a library. We own multiple Christian philosophy books, such as Colin Brown’s Philosophy, and I bought (the seventh edition of) Socrates to Sartre and Beyond: A History of Philosophy by Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser for 75 pesos at a clearance sale (anywhere else it would have cost about ten times as much). These will my primary “textbooks” for the semester, because home schoolers have a knack for being autodidactic. My blogging on Greek philosophy is my “papers.” The bulk of what I’ll be writing will be taken from Socrates to Sartre and Beyond, because it is a much more comprehensive volume than Brown’s and includes the pre-Socratic philosophers, albeit its comments on these are not as extensive as those on Plato and Aristotle.

                                                                

Opening Questions

            

Stumpf and Fieser (hereafter Stumpf-Fieser) say that “[t]he story of Western philosophy in a series of Greek islands and colonies during the sixth century BCE…. Some original thinkers were driven by very specific puzzles, most notably, ‘what are things really like?’ and ‘how can we explain the process of change in things?’ The solutions they gave to these puzzles were shortly thereafter dubbed ‘philosophy’—the love of wisdom.”[1] Presupposed in the first question was the notion that there is a duality between appearance and reality. The second was perhaps motivated by a desire to come to grips with the painful process of transformation. Stumpf-Fieser continue: “These facts [i.e. birth, death, growth, and decay] raised sweeping questions of how things and people come into existence, can be different at different times, and pass out of existence only to be followed by other things and persons.”[2] Some of the conclusions that these early philosophers came to were unhelpful, but these failures “are not as important as the fact that they focused upon these specific questions [italics in the original].”[3]

Ionia

            

The seaport town of Miletus lay in western Ionia in Anatolia (Asia Minor) across Athens, and the first Greek philosophers are called Milesians or Ionians. Commerce and cosmopolitan ideas flowed through the streets of Miletus, and the city was considered the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities mid-sixth century B.C. The leisure time made possible by this wealth was favorable for an environment of artistic activity and intellectual inquiry. [4]

           

Ionia had produced the great poet Homer about a century before the first Greek philosophers. Homer’s epics included stories of gods who were very human-like, immoderate, proud, and insubordinate (the last two characteristics are lumped up in the Greek term ὕβρις [hubris])—gods who weren’t morally upright: they were simply stronger than humans and demanded obedience. Hinted at in Homer’s narratives is a sense of natural order: “fate,” to which even gods are subject; but the Iliad and Odyssey both are saturated in human-ness—gods are impulsive, like their human counterparts, and natural laws do not hold sway over physical processes. A contemporary of Homer, Hesiod, sought to alter these ideas by attributing moral consistency to the gods. The gods, especially Zeus, retained control of nature in Hesiod’s reformulation, but there is now a moral order aimed at the good of people, contra Homer’s view of the gods’ whimsicality. [5]

          

The universe being a moral order, Stumpf-Fieser posit that “it is a short step to say, without any reference to gods, that there is an impersonal force controlling the structure of the universe and regulating its process of changes.”[6]

            

Here enter the great Ionian philosophers Thales (c. 585 B.C.), Anaximender (c. 610-546 B.C.), and Anaximenes (6^th century B.C.). Stepping out beyond Homer’s and Hesiod’s mythologies, these men employed independent thought in order to philosophize and asked the questions about the nature of things and of change, and by doing so espoused a proto-scientific, as opposed to a myth-oriented, method. “[Greek philosophy] was not a matter only of seeing or believing, but of thinking, and philosophy meant thinking about basic questions with an attitude of genuine and free inquiry.”[7]

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[1] Nobody ever reads these, but for style points: Samuel Enoch Stumpf, James Fieser, Socrates to Sartre and Beyond: A History of Philosophy, Seventh Edition, p. 5 (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2003)

[2] Ibid., pp. 5-6

[3] Ibid., p. 6

[4] Ibid., p. 6, Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miletus

[5] Stumpf, Fieser, Socrates to Sartre, p. 6

[6] Ibid., p. 6

[7] Ibid., p. 6