Happy Sunday, dear readers! I’ve decided to give you all a bit of a break, since Friday’s post was rather long, and post a poem!
I wrote this poem after I took a class in college on Aristotle’s ethics (the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and the Magna Moralia). It was a graduate level philosophy course, and though I had taken several philosophy courses before, I found it particularly hard in this course to acclimatize my mind to the style of analytic philosophy required for our papers. I don’t know if I am really an analytic thinker. Whenever I try to use hard logic to puzzle through anything, especially morals and ethics, I twist myself into a pretzel and get tied up in all sorts of knots.
My final paper was on Aristotle’s concept of akrasia: why do people fail to act virtuously, when they know what the right course of action is—that is to say, why do we act against our better judgment? After writing that paper, I felt unsatisfied with the conclusions I had drawn and ended up putting the problem to myself in sonnet form. I have often felt that poetical thinking is an equally valid a way to pick through philosophical issues. But you can judge for yourself from the poem below.
(It helps to read on desktop to preserve the line breaks!)
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Akrasia
Between what action one knows right and action a shadow falls, the murkier swamp of instinct, emotion, motive, wordless thought, adaption to unforeseen, unfavorable things linked. Our better judgments—like some lab-grown facts— were birthed in scrupulously sterile contexts; left grappling in the ring with the bloody axe of actuality, they fail the tests. Do two moons tug the tides to opposite shores? Then pity the human, tossed and buffeted by many winds, whim-driven saboteurs of reason’s course, to which we were committed. Few voluntarily will choose the bad but, when the moment presses, pick being glad.
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