Professor Gibbs
began the lecture by telling us that he believes that methodology should always
follow the work of science, and so students that have yet to hand in their
essays will not receive a mark for them until they do so.
He took a moment to
explain to those of us that heard his previous lecture, that Nietzsche is
horrifically offensive to not only readers of our day but of his day as well.
His aesthetic is designed to shock and this is true to some degree even for
Kierkegaard. Nietzsche thought that niceness needed to be disrupted with a
rhetoric that was offensive to everyone.
Kierkegaard was a
great psychologist and so were Nietzsche and Plato.
Plato observed that
though honour tells people not to feast their eyes on the dead bodies when they
walk around the battlefield, there is nonetheless an erotic desire to do so.
We are drawn to the
disgusting but we won’t admit it. We would never look at someone being tortured
unless it’s on film.
Nietzsche wants to
connect us with the contradictions in our psyche.
It’s good to have a
bad conscience because it’s better than feeling like a loser.
What we ought to do
comes from what we owe. The word “ought” is intrinsically relational. ”Ought”
emerged from owing. A lot of what is owed to us is not based on equalization.
The professor then
quoted Jennifer Neville Lake’s victim impact statement in Marco Muzzo’s drunk
driving trial – “My kids paid for your drinks with the price of their blood.”
Then he asked, “How do you punish someone for three children and a
grandfather?”
Someone said, “Cut off three limbs!” The
professor wasn’t sure of that, but he admitted that the cutting off of the hand
for theft made some sense. But returning to the death of three children, he
said, “You can’t hang someone three times.”
Anger has no limit, so there is no easy
proportionality as to what is owed. There was a time when satisfaction could
only have been derived from making he, his children, his family or even his
whole town suffer.
So we have unlimited debt, infinite guilt
and maybe even sin if we’re not careful.
Crowds used to go to hangings and took
delight in participating in public torture.
Memory comes from pain.
The pagans saw war as something the gods
enjoyed watching humans engage in.
Then Christianity came along and said
that people could be saved. Debts became normalized and what was owed was given
measured limits, as in a pound of flesh. People acquired values and ordered
capacity. But it was our inherent desire to have others under our thumbs that
led to this ordered violence.
The criminal emerged as a breaker of
rules.
The bishop of Rome has called for global
prohibition of capital punishment.
We now insult evil by overlooking it with forgiveness, grace and mercy. We
don’t recognize that forgiveness is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Law is an impersonal weapon against
resentment. It’s not about your feelings. But law nonetheless comes from the
powerful that command.
There’s an origin and there’s an end. But
there are several ends along the way. There is a sequence of meanings over
time. The origin generates the string.
Anton Scalia said that the meaning of the
law is not in its origin.
Inherent in existence, things do not have
fixed meanings or ends. Nietzsche’s philosophy is rooted in the idea that
things keep moving, but also that it’s important to know the origin so that one
can measure the drift of the ends. The string of meanings is not exhausted at
the origin. The ends relate to one another and get their passion and energy
from the origin because the origin has more in it than any of the ends.
The will to power, one of Nietzsche’s
main doctrines is deeply undemocratic. Each new end overcomes the previous one
because it has more power.
This is not about power though but rather
the will to power.
The origin does not produce bad
conscience, which is the result of turning the will inward and against itself.
There was no bad conscience in the days of torture. Barbarian power was
supplanted by a perverse turn against the self. We build our own cage and
punish ourselves for being normal. The Viking raiders are a condition for
turning against the self. We found freedom in self-punishment. Selflessness is
a form of self-cruelty.
We owe a debt to the founders, to our
ancestors and to our parents that we will never be able to repay. We can’t
assuage the origin. We owe infinite debt just by existing and not paying it
makes us feel guilty. Payment is done in sacrifices of perhaps one’s first
born. But Christianity came along and told us that god can suffer on our
behalf. God can pay back both god and the ancestors. We internalize this in the
will to self torture.
Is an ideal set up here or torn down?
What do we lose or gain from it? The extinction of the will.
The 21st century is more
Nietzschean than the one before. Smart bombs and swords.
Has the bad conscience taken root so
deeply that there’s no way out?
After the lecture, I told Naomi that I
really enjoyed writing my paper on the last day of the. She said that she
struggled with hers right up until the end. She told me that it is frustrating
for her not to be able to write in Hebrew. She complained that English is such
a lazy language. I thought that was an interesting thing to say, so I asked her
to explain. She pointed out that people don’t use their mouth muscles and
barely even open them when they are speaking English. I confirmed that my mouth
certainly gets tired when I try to speak properly in French. She informed me
that in Hebrew, words like “that” and “it” are all covered by the same word.
There was something that I’d been curious
about for a while. How did Hebrew become the official language of Israel when
most of the Jews that came there didn’t speak it? She confirmed that Hebrew is
a revived language that needed the help of the rabbis and scholars to bring it
back.
We were the last two students in the room
and she stood chatting with me as I was getting ready to leave. I asked her if
she wanted to go for coffee but she said she had to meet a psychology study
group. We walked out together and she stopped to converse with me for a while
beside the bike stands. I opined that there seems to be a contradiction between
Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity inherited it’s “the meek shall inherit the
Earth” philosophy from the Jews, while at the same time talking about the Jews
of the Old Testament being more savage like the Vikings.
She told me about how Solomon gathered up
the great scholars of Jerusalem and gave them the mandate of writing the Bible.
She commented that Christianity is a
fucked up religion because it corrupted itself with so many pagan ideas along
the way. I admitted that it’s been a very adaptive religion but suggested that
it’s Christianities initial flexibility that eventually made it so powerful. I
pointed out that this is also true of the English language.
I went home, did some writing, slept for
an hour and a half and then rode back downtown through a fluffy wet snowfall
that stopped when I was about halfway to University College.
The lecture was on the topic of the last
two stories from Gabrielle Roy’s “The Road to Altamont”.
In “The Move”, Christine travels from
nowhere to nowhere, illustrating the active stasis of the prairies. The little
girl considered it the height of romance that her friend’s father was a mover
and got to carry the possessions of families from one home to another in his
horse drawn wagon. It served as a window to the past of the stories she’d heard
of her mother’s move as a child from Quebec to Manitoba.
The actual move is a rude awakening but
Christine the adult storyteller tries to rescue the situation from the future.
I thought it interesting that, although
the mover, Monsieur Pichette was working poor; the super poor people he moved
were an English family.
The move took place from morning till
evening, the same as the trip to Lake Winnipeg and back in the previous story.
A microcosmic lifespan.
All of the stories in this book involve travelling,
and I pointed out to Andrew that even the doll that the grandmother made for
Christine was a travelling doll because the grandmother had made a hat for her
with the explanation that one couldn’t travel without a hat. Andrew liked that.
All stories are fiction because it’s
impossible to tell any story exactly as it happened.
In the other stories, Christine the child
talks about being bored with the prairies, but as an adult in the last story
she speaks of her “beloved prairie”. She writes of hiding in the prairie and
this seems like an ironic statement because there is nowhere to hide. I pointed
out that when I was hitchhiking through Saskatchewan and standing on the
highway in the middle of the prairie, while looking off into the infinite distance
I had this sense that if I stepped off the road I could wander forever and
never be found.
When our parents stay alive they shield
us from mortality.
I learned that our essay topics have been
posted since the beginning of the course, but I want to get all the reading
done anyway before I focus on writing.
The temperature had dropped since I’d
ridden downtown and so the snow that had melted on my bike had apparently
gotten into my gear tube and frozen my bike in the last gear I’d used, which
was two down from the high gear, so I was a bit slower than I was used to.
On the way home, I stopped on Queen
between Spadina and Bathurst to go to the bank. I was on the sidewalk when a
tough looking drunk guy was staggering towards me. He said something
incomprehensible to me and gently punched my shoulder to emphasize whatever his
point was, and then moved on.
The horizon was striped with wine dipped
clouds that were layered with others that had been stained with strawberry.
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