Gentrification

           

            On Friday morning I headed down to the Sidney Smith Building for my first Continental Philosophy tutorial. I was looking forward to seeing Miriam again but she either didn’t come or simply was assigned one of the other two sessions. I suspect the latter is the case. I was the first person there. The TA for our group turned out to be Sean who is full of unrelaxed energy. He sat at his laptop, banging out rhythms while he was waiting to start. There are supposed to be twenty-five students in our tutorial but there were only eleven of us there when Sean started. The grading for this course is unique because just for just showing up at the tutorial and voicing an opinion gives us a full 25% of our overall mark. Sean congratulated us for giving a shit. He told us that he was supposed to ask five of us to join one of the other tutorials, but since there were only eleven of us, he chose not to this time.

            Sean introduced himself and promised that he gives a shit about each one of us. He told us a bit about himself, saying, “I’m a loud, white male who has ascended the privilege ladder. I’ve got it dialled up to eleven! I’m very intense! I do this like my life depends upon it because it does! I’m intense, but it’s safe. Don’t be intimidated. There are no stupid questions! This is exceptionally difficult material! I’m a hard but thorough grader but you’ll get more feedback than you ever have before! I’m harsh but not unfair! I’m looking for an excuse to give you an A!

            He urged us to bring at least one text based question to every tutorial and to have an angle.

            He said that the fear of public speaking is statistically considered to be a worse fear by people than the fear of death.

            He told us that he prefers to lean away from structure and towards conversation. He said that we could interrupt him but not any of our fellow students.

            He had each of us introduce ourselves and say something about our philosophical backgrounds. I said that I was an English major and that I’ve taken two philosophy courses so far. I described myself as being more of a right-brained thinker and so that’s why I enjoyed the Philosophy of Sex but hated Knowledge and Reality. Of the other students there was a wide mix from first year to fourth year.

            He declared, “I love Continental Philosophy! Continental Philosophy is the best!” He said that in Kerkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy is also psychological.  Nietzsche, Sean added, was a very troubled person. He said of Knowledge and Reality that it’s a very hard course. Continental Philosophy is psychologically more visceral because it deals with death, suffering and meaning.
            I commented, “So it’s more like poetry then!”

            He said that certainly the first two texts we would be studying are more performative and literary. Kerkegaard’s use of pseudonyms is a type of performance. The work is emotional. It attempts to untie cognitive knots. People read Nietzsche as a straight up moral relativist. Nietzsche was an arch atheist who wanted to exorcise the philosophical world of Christian morality, while Kerkegaard was profoundly Christian. Both of them, however, were existentialists.

            Kerkegaard’s pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, or John of the ladder, was a gesture to the Hegelian system. Architectonic of reason. An innate drive in reason for maximum generality and specificity.

            Hegel struggled to rise above Kant. Phenomena versus pneumena.

            Kant wrote “The Critique of Pure Reason” – “In order to understand how judgement works we have to posit certain structures in the mind and shut the door on any other absolutes.”

            There are phenomena which are appearances. The way the world appears to you depends on you. This creates a chasm between phenomena and pneumena.

            Then Hegel came along with “geist”.

            Kerkegaard rebelled against the search for absolute knowledge and the forgetting of concrete problems of being. Because he believes in god he thinks that there is an ascent.

            Hegel thinks that everything is spirit. In the teleological analysis of history, knowledge is the historical process. Individuals are spirits that are part of a bigger spirit.

            Kerkegaard is less abstract. He uses a pseudonym to distance himself from the material so that the reader will be drawn in to participate. He doesn’t want to be an authority at the centre. His pseudonymic texts are more procedural.

            Sean told us to think about the propositio and the last part of the preface.

            I had time to go home for a couple of hours before teaching my yoga class. There was a meeting in the healing centre that didn’t clear out until five minutes before my class was supposed to start. The leader of the group told me that it was about speaking out against the gentrification of Parkdale. He asked to pass the info on to my students. Anna and Eleanor both came to the class. When I told them about the group, Anna rolled her eyes, and asked, “Do you know how long they’ve been trying to fight gentrification in Parkdale? Ever since the new owners of the Gladstone Hotel kicked out its tenants!” This happened more than ten years ago.

If I heard Anna right, she’s the president of the West Lodge Tenants Association. She told me that she remembers when the business beneath where I now live was a hat shop.

I had a bit of an argument with Eleanor about the difference between physical and psychological addiction in reference to marijuana. She couldn’t understand why marijuana couldn’t be physically addictive if it gives someone pleasure. I said that it’s about more than pleasure when something is physically addictive. It’s about feeling that the body needs the drug desperately to the point that they almost think they’ll die without it.

I watched an episode of Make Room for Daddy in which Danny was auditioning piano players for a USO tour and had this one Hipster who called him every name but Danny, explaining that no one calls anybody by their real name. He called him Jack, Clyde and several other appellations. He also did a handshake that involved him sliding his palm over Danny’s. The show ended with a song and skit that would be considered extremely racist by today’s standards. Danny and another man pretended to be Chinese and sang a ridiculous song in which English words were made to sound like Chinese.