Easter Seals Executives Make Big Bucks

             

            On Friday I was fifteen minutes early for my tutorial and I arrived at the same time as a young woman who seemed recognize me, though I didn’t recognize her, but maybe she didn’t know me at all and was just being friendly. We started talking about philosophy courses and we both hated Knowledge and Reality. I told her about The Philosophy of Sex and how one of the arguments we read was pro-paedophilia. I related to her that one of the things the professor in that course talked about was how in ancient Greece there had been a tradition of shepherding boys into manhood. The idea that these mentors had penetrative sex with the boys was a myth. The kind of sexual relations they had was more masturbatory because the Greeks believed that to have penetrative sex with a boy would defeat the purpose of helping him to become a man. She seemed to think this made sense, but before we could discuss it further, Sean came and she went with him to show him her essay outline.

            The tutorial began with Sean telling us that if we were still having problems understanding Hiedegger, we should do the required reading of Levinas, because it starts off with Heidegger and makes his philosophy super clear.

            Because we are tied to time, Dasein is not only about presence, but also passing away from existence. Heidegger’s philosophy is a meditation on finitude. The horizon of all possibilities is your death. Death is a structural component of your capacity for meaning. Passing away is a clearing of Being and it is part of time. We have to reckon with our own nihilation. What you are is a being who intrinsically understands your own impermanence, and this brings you closer to Being.

            If all human beings ceased to exist, Being would still be there, but there would be no one around to disclose it. Because of language, Being discloses the self as self. There is a darker current for Heidegger about nothingness. He becomes more impersonal as he begins to talk about language. Levinas has a powerful pushback to this.

            Someone asked how language is a path to Being.

            Sean explained that Jean Paul Sartre made Existentialism super sexy and cool in France and that people would be smoking their cigarettes and drinking their coffee and feeling cool while talking about existence. But then Heidegger came along and took a big German piss all over it. He thought that French Existentialism was superficial.

            Sean said that some students of the Philosophy of Language spend all their time just studying the meaning of the word “that”. Language helps us to express thinking.

            Sean told us that since Heidegger thought that poetry was our bridge to Being, he tried to write some poetry himself, but was a lousy poet. His favourite poet was Holderlin. I had to look him up later and found that he had been roommates with both Hegel and Schelling and was an influence on their philosophy. Here’s the third and last verse of his poem, “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny”: “A place to rest isn't given to us. 
Suffering humans decline and blindly fall from one hour to the next, like water thrown 
from cliff to cliff, year after year, down into the Unknown.”

            Sean pointed out that Heidegger became a Nazi as a result of his attempt to understand concrete experience in a localized way, that is, in terms of nationalism.

            Sean asked us if any of us were familiar with the Nine Inch Nails album “The Fragile”, but none of us were, though we were familiar with Nine Inch Nails. He seemed disappointed and said that we made him feel old. He said that there is a song on that album called “The Way Out Is Through” that relates to what we were discussing. I looked it up later. Lyrically it is very short: “Underneath it all we feel so small. The heavens fall but still we crawl. All I’ve undergone, I will keep on.”

            Most philosophy is about rejecting death, but Heidegger reconciles the self with the reality of passing on.

            Being is pure transcendence and a field of presence. Things come to be and they pass away. What questions are primordial? Any philosophy is concrete thinking between language using beings.

            I asked if we could think without language. Someone said that it depends on what I mean by language. I said the language that we speak. She suggested that when images enter our minds without words it could be a type of language. I countered that that could be just dreaming rather than thinking. Someone else gave the example of cases of people who had lived isolated from other humans but had developed some type of cognition without language. I argued that maybe that type of cognition isn’t much different from what my cat experiences.

I can see how we can blank out and allow new thoughts in, but I think that the moments when the mind is conscious but a non-verbal state of mind may not be a state of thinking but rather of resting. This non-verbal state aids thinking but may not be thinking in itself. The recognition of distinct shapes, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes and behaviours could serve to some degree as a non-verbal language because the recognition of each distinct thing would make it symbolic. All of these recognized things would become a sort of non-verbal vocabulary and we could probably imagine ourselves interacting with that environment when we are not physically doing so and perhaps use this type of imagining to plan future behaviours because we would also recognize to some extent the passage of time without words. But would this type of vocabulary allow us to think objectively about our environment or to expand our minds beyond our immediate experience?

Sean said that for both Heidegger and Levinas, language is core. They are extremely anthropocentric.

As I was getting ready to leave, I looked to the door and was pleasantly surprised to see Naama standing there. She came in and told me that she was an hour early but she’d been downtown anyway and decided she’d catch Sean’s earlier tutorial. We discussed the essay assignment a bit before I left. She told me she wouldn’t be in class until the following Thursday.

I had an appointment at 11:30 with Andrew Lesk to show him my Short Story essay thesis. University College is just a short distance from the Sidney Smith building, through a laneway off St George that runs straight into Kings College Circle. I was about fifteen minutes early, but I sat outside of Andrew’s office until he came. He looked at my thesis and immediately started crossing things out. I had begun with, “To feel a sense of belonging to two places at the same time causes each location to find a home in different parts of the mind. The place left behind becomes one’s romantic inner world and the new location is where the quotidian work of building and maintaining home and family is applied.” Only in the next sentence did I begin talking about Gabrielle Roy’s stories. Andrew told me to either move those opening sentences into the body of the essay or get rid of them all together. He said that in an essay I should get to the point of what I’m writing about right away. In my experience I’ve been steered in the opposite direction by some other instructors in the past, and so it gets confusing every time I try to pin the essay writing procedure down to a formula. Now I know what Andrew expects anyway.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home and the cashiers there were asking each customer if they want to donate two dollars for Easter Seals kids. Even if I had the money to donate to a charity I would want to research it to find out how many paid employees the charity has. I discovered when I got home and searched that some executives for Easter Seals receive salaries ranging from $100,000 to almost $300,000 a year, with added bonuses. These are 1995 figures though, so their salaries may be a lot higher now. Now I don’t feel like as much of a dick for turning them down.