Couplets: Composed during the Humanities Final Exam

(Not to be taken as a substitute for study!)


Occam’s razor cuts the soul
Out of the empiric whole.

Machiavelli’s other cheek
Is turned to realpolitik.

From Bacon’s lofty knowledge tower
Man sees all nature in his power.

Descartes distinctly finds that man’s
A function of his cogitans.

Thrasymachus is Hobbes’s man;
His hope for peace, Leviathan.

Society has misunderstood,
Says Rousseau, that man’s nature’s good.

According to de Condorcet,
Reason will chase death away.

Bentham takes mankind’s true measure
By subtracting pain from pleasure.

For Shelley, who would be the wind,
’Twas God and not Prometheus sinned.

Darwin’s man (once chimpanzee):
Through accident, complexity.

Marx redistributes goods to end
Class war and human history mend.

Nietzsche’s barbaroi are free
From sickly slave morality.

Freud finds man where he is hid,
In the ego’s war with id.

The archetype-clad self will be,
For Jung, absolute deity.

In Sartre one’s essence can’t exist
Till one acts, like a Communist.

Man is the life-support machine
For Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene.

TV’s Oprah Winfrey hooks
Millions into buying books.

Who among them will discern
In books the truth for which they yearn?