"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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The italicised sections show Livingstone at his most cryptic and could be
called “A Brief History of the Development of the Intellect in Shorthand”. Stanza two
examines the causes of the sundering of the will and the imagination and concentrates on
Nietzsche’s idea that “God is dead”. 43 Livingstone uses the Bible as a starting point (“So
long Matthew, Mark, Luke, / John!”). As one of the first German materialist
philosophers, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) “slackly targeted”’ religion through the use
of religious psychology. Then follows a list of other 19 th Century influential thinkers who
argued against the existence of God from the perspectives of evolutionary theory
(Darwin), scientific socialism (Marx), rationality and ‘the will to power’ (Nietzsche) and
the human unconscious (Freud). The stanza ends with the development of logical
positivism as a 20 th Century philosophy through the reference to “Ayer and Russell”.
The next stanza examines the idea of morality through a reference to the German
theo-philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1904), who argued that reason is the final
authority for morality or what Livingstone calls “conscience”. The later American
philosopher Clarence Irving Lewis (1883-1964) was concerned with logic, epistemology
and moral philosophy. The stanza ends with a reference to the 15 th Century German
monk Thomas à Kempis who in The Imitation of Christ argued for the moral example set
by Christ.
Livingstone then grapples with Paley’s argument from design (stanza four). The
English theologian William Paley (1743-1805) used the figure of a watchmaker as an
intelligent designer to argue for the existence of God and his contemporary, the
philosopher David Hume, refuted it. This argument from design causes convoluted
questioning, conveyed in cryptic diction, which – along with the use of questions and half
answers – reflects Livingstone’s uncertainty:
Capitals there? Perhaps not, these days.
Paley Versus Hume: the watchmaker,
or: the child hurling prodigal cogs.
Whose is the child’s, if not the maker’s?
The remainder of the stanza reflects a subtle move into mysticism. The sun
strokes him (line 23) and it seems that it is this awareness of the physical world and the
43
Information on all the philosophers examined in this poem comes from the electronic encyclopaedia,
Encarta.