Naomi didn’t come to Continental Philosophy
class. I noticed that I’m not the only student there with a cold.
When Professor
Gibbs came in he sat down behind his desk in a relaxed position while looking
at his phone, so I took it as an opportunity to ask him a question. It was a
follow up to my query on Tuesday about the absolutely different. I suggested
first of all that the whole idea of “absolute” anything, including god, could
be a human construct. He said it could be, but then it wouldn’t be absolute. I
argued that there are plenty of unknowns and maybe absolute unknowns within
each human and I put it to him that it could be that the human mind
deliberately deconstructs the known to create unknowns so it can enjoy fishing.
He then reminded me that this stuff is hard. “Yeah” I agreed, but I just want
to …” He finished my sentence, “Not make sense of it in a good way!’ I nodded
and sat down.
He began the
lecture by telling us something I didn’t know about Blackboard, where our
course websites live. He said, “We know when you go on Blackboard. We know when
you look at the syllabus.” He said that nobody tells us this but they are not
unlike CSIS in many ways. He advised us to download the essay topics because
he’d know if we didn’t.
He told us that
once upon a time, after the war, during the 50s, 60s and 70s people wanted to
be Existentialists. They were going through an adolescent modernity crisis and
nothing made sense. “When you get to my age though” he added, “everything makes
sense.” Modern Existentialism faded out by the mid 1980s. He doesn’t think
there are any millennials that are Existentialists.
Kierkegaard was an
Existentialist and even a type of nihilist. He wanted to rebel against the way
things were. Schelling was the one that started it all and Kierkegaard went to
Berlin to line up for his lectures but his critique was that he was too old to
be listening to him and Schelling was too old to be lecturing. Schelling held
Hegel’s chair and became an Aristotelian. Aristotle also thought that there was
possibility in relation to necessity, but there isn’t.
Is the past more
necessary than the future? What does it mean to say that existence isn’t
necessary? There is freedom in existence.
According to Kant, existence is not a real predicate. Coming into
existence is changing. If something exists it is changing property. But coming
into existence is not changing property. Because the professor has written on
the blackboard, the blackboard’s existence has changed. Coming into existence
is a change of being from non-being to existing. The change is not one of
essence or whatness, but rather in thusness. If something can come into
existence it changes from the possible to the actual.
Necessity. Can the
necessary come into existence? No, because it relates to itself alone and it
cannot change. The necessary has no relationship to existence at all.
Philosophers often like things that don’t change. The impossibility of change
of the necessary does not equate unchangeability with necessity.
X cannot cause its
own existence. All coming into existence depends on something else and the
losing of possibility. Nothing comes into existence by necessity or logical
ground but everything comes into existence by freedom and cause. There is no
rational line. Every cause terminates in a freely effecting cause. Not the
freedom of the thing that exists but of something else.
The historical is
kind of like the past. To come into existence is kind of historical. Nothing
exists only in the present. Climacus would say that nature has a sense of
history, but we would disagree now. The pastness of natural events is different
from the pastness of human events. The eternal has no history. Historical
coming into existence is coming into existence within coming into existence. A
relatively freely effecting cause points towards an absolutely freely effecting
cause. If we didn’t exist there would be no history. Freedom of human action is
a form of absolute freedom.
Not being leads to
existence. Within things that exist, existing things lead to free change, a
second coming into existence in the absolutely free action created by another
free action.
Some would say that
Stephen Harper lost the election, while others would say that Justin Trudeau
won. Harper’s loss is history because it didn’t need to happen. The election
was not just Harper relating to himself. He still doesn’t need to have lost it.
If he had to lose, it means he wasn’t free. Historical records won’t prove that
Harper had to lose. Just because the historical past happened doesn’t mean that
it had to. The past, by happening, doesn’t become necessary. Then he said, “All
historians please leave the room!” then dismissed the statement, explaining
that I was a Canadian joke. He said that sometimes we think, when we know the
past, that it had to be, but we suffer from an illusion. It only looks later
like it should have been necessary. In each step in the teleological process
there is a pause for the insertion of discontinuity through historical time and
my existence is resecured at every instant. Coming into existence is not given
immediately. We need to make certain about coming to existence. This is an act
of will. Knowing this change is also an act of will. We have to believe because
belief annihilates uncertainty. According to the Greek sceptics, doubt is a choice
we don’t need to take. What happens is not necessary. Contingency spreading is
the nature of existence. Belief is a resolution rather than a conclusion. It is
not necessary. Belief is the opposite of doubt and they are both passions.
Neither one is a form of knowledge but they are both acts of free will. Our
thinking apparatus is more about will than reason. The “what” does not warrant
the “thus”. You can’t tell someone else enough.
We don’t know that
Jesus’ life happened. Lots of Jewish guys were getting crucified at the time.
Our only relation to it is faith. God becoming man is not a typical historical
event. God in the flesh is unintelligible. It is contradictory. It’s historical
but paradoxical. It contrasts what comes into existence with the necessary. The
event is not necessary. Faith is not necessary. Socrates did not believe in god
but rather knew about god.
Knowing a lot about
Jesus’ life does not bring one closer to faith. The next generation has a
better perspective on the previous historical event. The holocaust was
relatively invisible while it was happening. To live right after the time of
Jesus gives one a better chance of taking the events seriously, but it doesn’t
bring about faith.
After the lecture I
headed down to OCADU. I was about half an hour early but the room was open and
empty. I worked again for Yang Cao, and since this was another of his third
year classes, I did the same thing for them as I did the night before.
After work I was
almost an hour early for my Short Story class, but there were about three other
students who also took advantage of the empty room. There’s free wi-fi anywhere
on campus and so it’s attractive to have a nice quiet place to surf the
internet.
When Andrew Lesk
came, we discussed next week’s take home test. The questions will be available
on the night of Thursday February 11th and we have to hand it in the next day
by noon.
Rather than a
lecture on Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”, similarly to the previous
Thursday class, we split into groups to discuss aspects of the story that were
pre-selected by Andrew. I was in group one with Madeline, with whom I had been
in Children’s Literature class, a young woman who introduced herself as
Chelsea, and two others who discussed our question between the two of them. Our
question asked what the first paragraph tells us about the status of the
Sheridan family.
The Sheridans have
their gardener mowing the lawns (plural) from the crack of dawn. This suggests
that they have acres of land that simply exists to be looked at. Hundreds of
roses came into bloom overnight and the final line of the paragraph that refers
to this is heavy with symbolism. The bushes bowed down to the roses as if they
had been visited by archangels. This not only implies that the Sheridans think
they control nature but that they are also closer to god.
Question two asked
what Laura being given the job of supervising the workmen says about class
barriers. Laura, though a young woman, is not fully grown up, and yet she is
supervising fully grown working class men.
Question three asks
how Jose is shown to be a true Sheridan. She thinks that her servants enjoy
obeying her.
Question four asks
why, from a class point of view, it is extravagant for Laura to want to express
sympathy to the working class Scott family over the death of Mr Scott. Their
families would not normally interact unless the poorer family were working for
the richer one. Laura has a whimsical fascination with the working class that
presents her as being a small crack in her own class that is portentous of it
widening as the 20th Century progresses.
How does Laura’s
mother try to seduce Laura back to the Sheridan way of thinking with a hat? The
hat is an heirloom that represents an inherited state of mind.
Mrs Scott tells
Laura that her dead husband, on display, “looks a picture”. Earlier, Laura’s
mother tells Laura that “she looks a picture” in the hat. Perhaps each
“picture” is the best that each person, in their class, can hope for.
The story ends in
stasis, which is volatile, driving us back to the psychological tensions of the
story. Emotions not equalling their rationale create stasis. The stasis does
not allow us to make predictions about what will happen next.
After class I
talked to Andrew about the link to Dash Shaw’s graphic novel, “Body World”. He
said he had a hard copy of the book, but hadn’t read it. He did read my essay
though and told me that it makes him want to read the book, which he might do
during Reading Week. I suggested that it would be a good book to include in his
Graphic Novel course. He said that he has taken student’s suggestions for
course material in the past and that’s how he brought Daniel Clowes’s “David
Boring” into the course.
I rode home by way
of Bloor Street because I wanted to check out some of the second hand clothing
stores near Bloor and Lansdowne to see if they had any leather jackets. My
brown one was coming apart in the back just below the collar. I went to the
Salvation Army thrift store and Ransack the Universe, but didn’t find anything.
At Vintage World there was a wide selection of leather jackets and coats, and I
found a badass looking motorcycle jacket that was only slightly bigger than my
size, which is ideal for underlayers in the wintertime. Before tax, it was
$60.00. I suspected when I got it home that it wasn’t real leather, and pretty
much confirmed that from comparative tests that were suggested on various
online sites, such as the “saliva test”. Supposedly a real leather jacket is
supposed to absorb the liquid, whereas spit floats on synthetic leather. There
was also the fact that if a piece of clothing is made of leather, that fact
increases the sales value and so it’s almost always displayed on a label. This
jacket only said that it was made in Canada. It was the best looking and
fitting jacket I’d seen and it was surprisingly inexpensive, so I didn’t care
that much if it wasn’t leather, other than to dread it wearing out sooner than
would a real leather jacket. I began to wonder though if my brown jacket, which
I’d found on the street about three years before, was made of real leather. It
had seemed to wear out so quickly.
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