Nietzsche's Ménage à Trois

           

            I got to Alumni Hall about ten minutes later than usual, as I’d taken the time to print and staple the notes I’d made toward my essay, but there were only two students ahead of me in the lecture theatre. Naomi came in about five minutes before start time, telling me that she’d had an eventful morning because there had been no heat and no lights in her apartment. I gathered that she has at least two roommates, one of which is a nineteen-year-old guy and none of which know anything about fixing things when they go wrong. I’m always fascinated when I hear about people successfully living with other people, so I asked her if she’d had to live in a dormitory situation when she was in the Israeli army. She said that when she was in training she did and when she was in officers training she lived with twenty other women. “Did you get along?” I inquired. “No!” she answered, with a tone that meant, “Of course not!”  I was curious as to what officer’s rank she’d achieved but she told me that she’d dropped out of the program.

            Since this was our last class before Reading Week, professor Gibbs began by saying, “Those of you going to warmer places, I hate you!”

            He began the class by allowing a few questions. I told him that I wasn’t clear on the idea that necessity cannot come into existence. He said that if something is necessary it means that there is no other option. I commented that we often speak of things becoming necessary. He explained that is a mistake of our language. I argued, “What if I suddenly need chemotherapy?” He answered, “First of all, I hope that’s not the case” but went on to elucidate that whatever is necessary has always been necessary.

            Someone asked a question that related to passion to which he clarified that the definition of the word has changed from describing a passive activity to being more active. He added that people should read up on St Valentine before getting too excited about being passionate. He said that there is still a passive sense of the word whereby someone will explain that they are not moved by someone because they are not overcome with passion.

            Beginning his talk about Nietzsche, he said that Nietzsche was the son of a minister, like Hegel and Kierkegaard. He told us that the thing about German philosophers was that they were all pastor’s kids, which meant that they could get away with anything.

            Nietzsche was a friend with Paul Rée, who became lovers with psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé. Nietzsche, Rée and Salomé were involved in a ménage a trios that didn’t work out and so they hated each other forever after that.

            Between 1878 and 1889, Nietzsche wrote a ton of books, much like Kierkegaard’s ten year prolific period. Professor Gibbs added that, to their credit, neither one of them were professors. This explained the non-academic style of their writing. Nietzsche’s style favoured aphorisms rather than an essay format. Another thing that he shared with Kierkegaard was a desire to be disruptive. When both philosophers write on psychology they are very similar.

            Nietzsche was not a big fan of Socrates and he despised Plato.

            Of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, the professor told us that he wished he could fit it into this course but that there is just too much there.

            Nietzsche was over the top and once published an essay explaining, “Why I’m so great!”

            After Nietzsche had his mental breakdown he was in a vegetative state for a few years, during which time his sister set Nietzsche up as a living shrine to himself, inviting people to come and look at Nietzsche. After his death, she gained the publication rights to his books and twisted his ideas to promote an anti-Semitic agenda, even though he himself despised anti-Semitism.

            Nietzsche concluded that we don’t need god to not know the self. Socrates and Kierkegaard have helped us on the philosophy of coming to know the self, but then Nietzsche came along and blew it all apart. He asked why do we even want to know? Professor Gibbs suggested that maybe by the end of this course we would be able to criticize our own desire to know. We are taking a course in which we are studying a philosopher says that nobody should take courses. Continental Philosophy undermines the goodness of knowledge. When your parents ask you what you learned to day you can tell them that you learned that you learned that knowledge is perverse.

            Nietzsche started out wanting to know about why we want to know; why does evil exist; why are things unfair. He concluded that maybe good and evil are man made inventions. He said that the value of an action is more important than whether or not it’s good or evil. He was not interested in passion or pity and saw pity as turning against life. He asked, what if we devalued everything until nothing is valuable. The only thing good is nothing. Nihilism is a spectre that haunts Nietzsche’s work. The professor said that the best dystopias are the ones where we are gone. He added that Nihilism looks different now than it did in Nietzsche’s day.

            Start with pity and figure out what it’s good for.

            Is a good man better than an evil man? Maybe morality is the danger.

            For Nietzsche, history is thick. There is a current on the surface but none below.

            Nietzsche thought that his ideas were over everybody’s heads and declared that nobody has understood six sentences of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”.  He wrote a commentary on the book but said that he betted people wouldn’t get that right either.

            Professor Gibbs then wrote “good/evil” and “good/bad” side by side and asked us what they have in common. Someone answered that they both have a slash between them.

            The good of one is the evil of the other. What they have in common is opposition. Opposition makes will and value possible. Value depends on opposition.

            In “A Genealogy of Morals” Nietzsche speaks of English psychologists who concluded that everyone acts in their own self-interest. Of course they do! This is not very Christian. It’s both anti-Christian and anti-Platonic. It challenged the high-flown 19^th Century morality that, for instance, offered the explanation of women. The English psychologists claimed that it was an eternal truth that everyone is self-interested. Nietzsche said they had forgotten where it had all come from. How did we ever end up with democracy?

            Nobody was more Nietzchean than Sigmund Freud.

            Morality doesn’t begin when somebody stops being an asshole.

            After the lecture, since Naomi and I were both planning to go to our TA’s office hours, I offered to walk with her up to the Jackman Humanities Building. On our way through Queen’s Park to Hoskin, up the Philosophers Walk, then behind the Royal Conservatory of Music to Devonshire and finally to Bloor, she told me the story of how growing up in Israel she had gotten in trouble in school because she’d been so bored. Her parents finally agreed to send her to an alternative school that was governed by the students themselves. There were no classes but students rather students had to approach teachers to ask them for help. If they wanted group instruction they had to organize as a group and petition a teacher to instruct them. If you had a complaint against another student you could “sue” them and put them on trial within the school. She said that in terms of education, when she was growing up, that school was the best thing that ever happened to her.

            The lounge was packed with students wanting to show their essay outlines to Sean.

            Christianity offends reason but belief doesn’t depend on reasons.

            Sean did not think that I was on the right track to argue about the probability of god in my essay. He said that it was a superficial approach and that I should add one more question to my argument.

            Naomi left before me because she said she needed to go home and eat, but as I was leaving the building I thought for sure I saw her sitting by herself in the lobby and eating a sandwich.

            I went home for a while. My plan had been to not go to sleep before Short Story class so that I could take a good solid nap when I came back before downloading and writing our first take home Short Story test. But I felt very sleepy and did take a half hour siesta before leaving.

            As we’ve done for the last two Thursdays, Andrew divided us in groups again to look at questions about J. G. Sime’s “An Irregular Union”.

The women in Sime’s stories are pioneers. Phyllis has her own apartment, her own money that she makes from the work of her brain, and yet she is having an affair with her boss and sits alone every night waiting for a telephone call. She is described as trying to be modern while thinking the same old thoughts. She is not independent other than financially. Changing clothing doesn’t change a person whether it’s an apron or a business suit. One has to think new thoughts to be modern, and compared her to an Uncle Tom and a sharecropper. I said, “She’s caught in a bad romance” and a young woman in my group said, “Okay, Lady Gaga!” I told Andrew that Phyllis’s room with only a skylight for a window reminds me of those vertical dungeons with the French name that prisoners were lowered into from above, one of which was featured in the movie “The Dark Knight Rises”.

After I got home I looked it up and remembered that the name of the dungeon was an “oubliette”. I sent Andrew an email about it with an image attached. I also added that because Phyllis’s window is a skylight, she can only see that which is above her. She is beneath what she sees.

I went to bed and tried to sleep but just ended up lying there for an hour and a half. I felt comfortable in repose and felt like I was getting rest, but as soon as I downloaded the test at 21:00 and tried to work on it, I began to remember that my brain is really a morning person. I worked on the first two short questions for an hour and a half but I was feeling groggy, so I went to bed early and promised myself I would get up early and tackle the test when I was fresh.