Heidegger

           

            On my way to class along College Street on Thursday morning, just before St George, a guy on a construction crew held up a stop sign to block eastbound traffic while a truck was turning into the site. While we were arrested, three of the guy’s colleagues took advantage of the halt to nonchalantly cross to the site. One of them appeared to be toasting us with his coffee, but he did have a coffee in each fist so he might have been simply talking to his pals with his hands.

At Alumni Hall, a student was sitting outside of the lecture theatre, still all bundled up for outdoors and working on his laptop. He looked like he was waiting for a bus.

When Naama arrived she asked how I’d done on my essay. It turned out that we got the exact same mark of 72, but I suggested to her that for her to get a B-minus while writing in English as a second language, it’s probably the equivalent of her getting a much higher mark.

            After Professor Gibbs came in, as part of another comment, he joked sarcastically about the moneymaking prospects of philosophy. It made me think of a skit that had been on the old SCTV show and so I asked Naama if she’d seen any SCTV reruns since she’d been in Canada. The professor smiled in recognition of the show. She answered that she hadn’t. With Professor Gibbs eavesdropping, I told her that they had done a fake TV spot advertising “Careers in Philosophy” and that the selling line was, “Many philosophers can make as much money as some poets!” The professor laughed.

            Naama told me that she grew up watching Middle Eastern television because there weren’t a lot of Israeli channels. She said that she’d learned English by reading the subtitles of Christian cartoons broadcast from Lebanon. She described one such show that featured a Bible quoting robot that would give quotations in response to given situations. I looked this up and what I found that fits this description closest is a show from the early 80s called Superbook, in which some kids and their robot go traveling in time through various Bible stories.

            I related a Christian claymation show called Davey & Goliath in which Goliath was a boy’s talking dog. It was a Lutheran Church vehicle but it was produced by the same company that created Gumby.

            Naama said that her family didn’t have cable till she was twelve. I told her that we got our first TV when I was four but we didn’t have an indoor bathroom till I was ten. She thought it was funny that we got a TV before we got a bathroom.

            As he began the lecture, Professor Gibbs announced that the Blackboard glitch had been cleared up and he found out that he has even more internet power as a professor than he previously thought. He said that he can change anyone’s grade from any course at any time and he can also tell what students were eating when they logged onto Blackboard.

            The professor had a few last words on Nietzsche before moving onto Heidegger.

            Human beings would rather will nothingness than not will anything. The will to nothingness was stronger in the 20^th Century than in the 19^th. But what can resist this will to nothingness?

            Free thinkers? No, because belief in truth is dangerous. Maybe we need to abandon truth.

            Science? No, because there is an unwillingness to evaluate it. There is a notion that all knowledge is good. Modern Science is derived from Protestantism. ‘

            Historians? No, because their discipline serves to try to prove that nothing matters.

            Philosophers? They wear the mask of asceticism. They are critical of others and themselves. They use reason to limit the self because they hate the self and they even use reason to fight reason.

            Cyborgs? Siri?

            Transferring power to god allows us to deny power to the self.

            The desire to be honest with oneself destroys morality. Suffering has too much meaning and so it hides the will to nothingness.

            Possession of the will to power could be the engine of self-overcoming. But how does one do this without killing the self? Will we be able to turn to human suffering and say it’s meaningless? Is that the way out or in?

            “Reading Nietzsche is like listening to a bombastic friend,” the professor said, “Reading Heidegger is like I don’t know what.”

            Heidegger wants to untie thinking.

            His “Being and Time” was the most important philosophical work of the 20^th Century. It asks what is the meaning of being.

            Martin Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University in 1933 and joined the Nazi party a little over a week later. He expressed limited but real praise for Adolph Hitler. He removed Jews from high positions at the university. Later, he sort of apologized.

            The Nazi’s found that Heidegger’s philosophy was well suited to their idea of historical destiny. Perhaps Heidegger was flattered to have a national government backing up his ideas.

            He spent most of the 1930s arguing in his mind with Nietzsche’s philosophy. Later he moved to poetic thinking or thinking with words. He tried to argue the closeness of poetry and philosophy.

            Professor Gibbs told us that you don’t have to be German to be an existentialist or an atheist. He said that even Schelling was an existentialist.

            Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is a bashing of Jean Paul Sartre. The ideas put forth in the letter are confusing, hard to understand and impossible to prove.

            Kierkegaard is funny. Heidegger is not.

            Every time Heidegger discloses something he hides something else. His work does not read like philosophy. It’s poetic and obscure and does not communicate readily. At this point the professor stressed that we have to communicate readily. We can’t write our essays the way that Heidegger wrote his Letter on Humanism.

            Language is the house of being and it costs less in Winnipeg.

            In the motion of essence from action to being, thinking carries the ball. Thinking is the highest action. Professor Gibbs commented at this point that Heidegger sounds here like Aristotle, but he added that he means that thinking is an activity in a different sense than Aristotle. Thinking lets human beings be what they are, which is thinking beings. Language is how being shows up. When we think and speak, stuff gets manifest. Language is where being lives and is addressed. Being needs a place. Thinking guards the house of being. The core of thinking is letting, which is openness welcoming into being.

            Nobody knows what being is, but it has a history. History has not housed being very well. Can thinking free us from that history?

            Our model of knowledge is bound up with technology controlling skill sets.

            The professor said that philosophy wants to become a science. Philosophy wants to focus on problem solving and to teach people to make better, sounder and more valid arguments. Heidegger says that we gave up thinking for technology. He wants a new reflection on science.

            On the word “humanism”, we only get “ism”s at the end of the day when things are no longer working. “Ism” looks like it is going to be essence. Every kind of humanism is metaphysical. Metaphysics presents entities in their being but doesn’t think there’s a difference between being and entities. How can we think the difference between whatever being is and the way things are? Can we imagine being that is not another object?

            Thinking is the thinking of being. Being needs thinking. The essence of being human is to think about being in such a way that being is changed. Language is a mode of access to things that don’t fit into language. For language to approach being we have to take the risk that there is nothing to say. Language negotiates in the boundary zone where it doesn’t work. What we need is language to house but not to own or pin down.

            Humans are unusual because they think about being.

            After the lecture I rode up to The Jackman Humanities building at St George and Bloor to meet with Sean during his TA office hours and to go over his comments on my essay. He said that there were too many comments for him to cover all the points, so I just asked him to give me some overall advice as to how I could improve and get a better mark the next time around. He told me that I’d had a good thesis but I hadn’t supported it throughout my paper. He also said that I should never do any writing on the body of my essay on the day that it’s scheduled to be handed in. I couldn’t see how that could be avoided. He argued that one should have a first draft of their essay a week before the deadline. Of course, I always aim to start the essay as soon as possible, but the material in this case was so difficult that I had to read it three times. He advised me not to try to have a full grasp on the whole topic for a seven-page essay but to just pick an aspect of it to address. Reading the complete work over and over is what one would do for a dissertation. I was the only student that came to see Sean that day.

            In reference to the situation that Sean had related to us in tutorial of a six year old having attacked Sean’s six year old with a brick, I told him that when I went to school, we played war every single recess. We threw snowballs, apples or potatoes at each other, depending on the season, but we never threw rocks at one another. I suggested that it’s because we got our frustrations out. He said that it wasn’t in his experience that schools are schools are more restrictive of children’s aggressions than they were when he went to school.

            After leaving Jackman, my plan had been to ride home and take a siesta, but it was snowing when I came out. I decided that I might go to University College and just read or sleep on the bench again, so I rode down there but on the way the prospect of sitting around for four hours seemed too tedious. The streets were merely wet with snow rather than covered in it, so I changed my mind and went home. I had about twenty minutes to spend on the computer and then I slept for about an hour and a half before heading back downtown.

            On Thursdays, though I’m always half an hour early, I’m never the first one in class. There are two or three students that are always there before me. When Madeline, who sits beside me, came in I greeted her and since she was absent from class on Tuesday, she asked me for the highlights.

            We spent the hour talking about Sinclair Ross’s “The Painted Door”.

            Women’s writing is the articulation of inarticulate experience. In “The Painted Door”, Anne struggles for narrative control.

            “It” represents unvoiced desires. Anne both denies and cultivates “it”. Maybe she knows “it” but refuses to understand “it”. Or maybe she understands “it” but won’t go there.

            The storm reflects Anne’s desires. When she tries to go out into it she wears men’s clothes. But “little snakelike tongues of snow discover her”. The snake represents forbidden desire. The story has Freudian overtones. The storm beats her back into the house. The shadow that Anne sees, whether it was really John’s shadow or not, is the shadow of her guilt. Having guilt is not being guilty but as a woman she will get the blame anyway.

            Andrew said that the phrase, “texture of the moment” made him wonder if Sinclair Ross had ever read Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”. I looked it up and found that he had a copy of it in French in his duffel bag, along with a French-English dictionary when he shipped off to fight in World War II.

            That night I watched the second third of the film adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, “The Mangler”. The dialogue is pretty horrible. I guess that in adapting a short story they had to add a lot of extra story. There are a lot of deviations.