The table no time for its existentialism and absurd chair leaning against the table’s futile stance. I’m a pragmatic man so I have no use for knowing myself. The table studies its own nature by looking at its askew shade. Chair, somberly contemplating suicide because it wants to remove its painfully ingrown nails. Paradoxically they keep it alive, in form, in function. I have only one reality and the clarity of purpose. My furniture’s introspection is a trifling problem in my busy condition. The table has begun questioning things. It likes it when I leave Camus on its surface. I hear the creaky whisper, quoting: ‘the
humanwooden heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it.’ Absurdly, the chair stares at the modernity of my modus operandi. I cannot be stopped to wonder. Progress is my mission. The table is a stranger to itself. The chair competes for my attention. I have appetites that the world cannot satisfy. Table is dissatisfied with its lucidity, through logic the chair has arrived at the conclusion that knowledge is a form of chaos. I’m a man of the world in spite of everything. In spite of poverty, war, injustice or my furniture’s uncertainty and their long episodes of incoherent silence.
poems on philosophy
The beautiful irrelevance of language.
Limitations to discourse and knowledge.
The undeniable reality of language,
the sounds inside our heads,
the discourse within our skulls,
the rigorous mathematics of our technologies,
is a matter of great uncertainty.
The fact that we rely so deeply in the functions of language
seriously undermines our attempts
at concrete knowledge.
The discovery that knowledge is portrayed by language
or symbols
and that linguistic symbols are inappropriately
capable of representing perceived reality
is an astounding obstacle to our assessment
of an objective reality.
In more simple and human terms,
the realization that we obtain “acceptable” knowledge
in any form by its communication
either by mathematical symbol or linguistic form,
already makes it clear that we are submitting ourselves
to an established norm.
This norm is adopted,
valued
and protected
by the establishment,
namely,
Science,
but once this establishment is submitted to the scrutiny of doubt,
we realize that Science or concrete, irrefutable knowledge
depends, and in fact,
survives on language and symbol,
thus we can begin doubting the certainty
and accuracy of its claims.
The first undeniable doubt is the perception
of the incapacity of language
or any symbol
of portraying reality.
Language is by its own nature, rigid, stiff and linear.
No matter how prodigious the scientist
or philosopher is,
the fact that he or she describes reality
by communicating a symbol,
already contributes to our suspicion:
the use of a rigid tool (language) to describe
a fluidly ungraspable perceivable reality.
The proof that language is inadequate to describe accurately reality
is in no way possible of being proved by language itself.
It must be realized, perceived, experienced by the thinker.
Just as Science seems to be the absolute truth to the world today,
we must never forget that Science is not an entity by itself;
it is preached and believed by humans.
Any human, no matter how committed to objectivity,
will still be influenced by subjective impulses, personal past experiences
and biased ideologies.
Science has by this account two main weaknesses.
It utilizes linguistic symbol to portray an un-symbolic phenomenon;
and secondly, it is sustained by humans which are never unbiased.
