PHILOSOPHICAL VERSES # 3

Harsadeva’s in a graveyard, perhaps in the Bengal.
Sweetness of winning an argument wins the philosopher females,
logical groupies who swoon at the sound of a logical onslaught,
Special in luck is the scholar refuting all refutation,
showing the self and the rest that is outside, that these are not bounded,
All that is said is wrong, and he proves it, including his own words.
But if it feels this right being wrong, he rather enjoys it.

* * *
Herbert Lionel (also Adolphus) Hart worked in Oxford.
Cheltenham seems so familiar, a sound or a sign from my travels.
Oxford as well seems to linger, but when did I ever walk by it?
Lawyers and loyal philosophers, worked in the war amid secrets,
figuring codes, combinations of letters, to overthrow Hitler.
All played a part, with papers and pencils, an army in secret.
War was concluded, they’re back to the classroom, resuming their lectures,
books to be written, and students to form in the ways of their elders.
Some laws are primitive, something like natural, primal and binding.
Others are fences and benchmarks enforcing the primeval dictates.
Others are rules for knowing the time and the place for the judgement.
Sometimes a payback makes sense, when bad men have done what deserves it.
Vengeance so cold and impartial, from judges who sit at a distance,
what we expect from the laws, for the books must always be balanced.
That is the reason to punish, then second for ends of deterrence.

***
David Hartley, born in Armley, medical doctor,
saw in vibrations mechanical sources of pleasure and sorrow.
Particles move in the ether along nervous pipelines to brain-head,
then to descend to the muscles to cause them to twitch and to quiver.

***

Eduard von Hartmann had joined the army and soon was promoted.
Soon his health failed him and he had to leave to become a civilian.
Waiting for health he lifted a paintbrush but genius fled him.
This is not yet the worst of all possible worlds, still evolving
worse every day. The Absolute still is unconscious, unhappy,
infinite wanting, infinite willing, but still unconscious.

* * *

Nicolai Hartmann was born in Riga, in Latvian blizzards,
ancient Livonia, ruled long ago by the Teutonic order.
Hartmann resigned from the study of medicine, taking up wisdom.
Thinking of Plato, he fought on the front four years for the Kaiser.
Every good problem has deep within it a core beyond reason.
So thinks a man to his knees in the mud of futile destruction.
Being is in layers, like colors of clay in the stench of the trenches.
Out of the mud by termites emerge cathedrals of lacework.
Something new out of freezing dew on the glass in the winter,
magic of things unexpected, called categorial novum.

* * *

Charles Hartshorne lived for a long time, well past a hundred.
Classical ways in philosophy turn what lives into marble.
Change is imperfection, but the divine must be static.
Hartshorne desired that this world and its sorrows could act upon God’s heart
then in some way, He must be entangled in this world’s mutations