Nasty Monkey

           

            On Tuesday, Professor Gibbs was in Montreal and so my TA, Sean, gave the first lecture on Heidegger, but he first of all had to call for help because he couldn’t get the mic working.

            Sean told us “Heidegger is a very special thinker. He was a Nazi. That’s a tough one!” It seems that there is an obligation to say he was a Nazi and that was bad, but then the person who says it moves right on to talk about how brilliant Heidegger was.

            He said that Nietzsche is easier on the brain than Heidegger. If you hold Nietzsche too close he appears to be a moral relativist; too far and he seems like a windbag; but if you hold him somewhere in between he’s a genius.

            With Heidegger you have to go into his cabin to join him in seclusion and then he can change the way you think.

            In “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger is recapitulating his earlier work, “Being and Time”. He is indirectly arguing with Sartre’s statement that existence precedes essence. Heidegger thinks that neither Sartre or Plato think about being deeply enough.

            We don’t understand how we are in the world. Human beings are stitched up in an overwhelming world in time by absorbed skillful coping. A deep analysis of what it means to be a human being will go beyond subject of object.

            What is the meaning of being? First ask the nature of the being that is asking that question. Being is not only spatiotemporal persistence.

            The history of metaphysics is a series of missed opportunities.

            We don’t get to talk about god until we understand being. If you try to find being you will miss it because it is closer that you are looking. The simple is hard to think.

            Kant said there is a unified observing subject but Heidegger says there is not.

            Language is the most important thing for Heidegger. It is central to our nature. Language is the house of being. It guards or shepherds the truth of being. Existence is wrapped up in our finitude. Language negotiates with this. Heidegger thinks it is wrong to say that language is just another part added onto our metaphysical thinking. Language is obscured by metaphysical terms. We talk crap all the time. Heidegger thinks that we need more poets, philosophers and thinkers. Poetry helps us disclose what it means to be in the world. We don’t understand the centrality of language and so we fall back into representational thinking. When we use language to speak to one another we dwell in the world. Through language we have the capacity to evoke an experience of our selves that is pure transcendence.

            Ek-sistence is the essence of the human being.

            We are the sorts of beings that are thrown into the world against their will and then throw meaning into the world.

            We have a tendency to wrap reason and transcendence up into metaphysical categories. Metaphysical philosophy and science carve up the world.

            Be receptive. Be passive. Being gives itself when we can let things be. Letting things be clears things away. Let phenomena happen and be themselves. Being gives truth.

            We have to overcome sociohistorical thinking by going back to its origin.

            For Nietzsche there needs to be a local moral commitment and a search for values and origins.

            Heidegger thinks that our conditioning is so thorough that our capacity to think about being has been co-opted. One can’t just transcend historical conditioning. This makes the solution strange but he thinks that it is simple. Philosophy shouldn’t be like science, it has to think the simple.

            Heidegger is trying to write the same thing and ask the same question over and over in different ways.

            Phenomenology is an infinite task. To think the truth of being requires preparation.

            History is how being shows the truth to us. Take what we’re given. Being through entities.

            Talk of transcendence leads automatically to the god concept. Heidegger thinks that superficial proofs of god are superficial. Let’s get “is” down before talking about god. Beneath our concrete, mundane, quotidian activities there is structure that makes “it” possible. Transcendence is not above, but rather an inhabitance.

            Spencer asked if Heidegger thinks there can be no philosophical progress.

            Sean answered that learning to ask the same question over and over again is progress. Solving problems helps us to miss the deeper point. We must ask, “What is the meaning of being?”

            There are two different ways that we are in the world: the embedded procedural and our capacity to speak. Heidegger’s views on language are controversial.

            Heidegger is not against science and math but he thinks that they can cause harm. Formal reasoning systems cause us to see the world in terms of resources.

            Students usually applaud after a TA lectures but no one did when Sean was finished. For myself, I thought that he went too fast and used a lot of confusing language. I didn’t have time to write everything he said down.

            I went home to have a siesta. I had planned on sleeping for an hour and a half but after less than half an hour I was awake and uncomfortable, so I got up and did some work on the computer for about an hour before riding back downtown for Short Story class.

            Our classroom in University College looks down from the second floor onto an ancient looking courtyard. Madeline sits by the window and before starting class, Andrew Lesk came over to look out onto the beautiful, spring like afternoon. He told her that once he’d taught a class out there because of a fire alarm, and said that it was nice but without the acoustics of being between walls, he’d had to shout himself hoarse.

            Each time we start a new author, Andrew asks us if we’d read them before. A few people had come across Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” in high school. A couple have people had read her novel, “Wise Blood” or seen the movie. Andrew said he hadn’t read the book but that the movie was strange.

            There is a consistent moral message in her stories. They are Christian and they are violent. The only Canadian equivalent to a Flannery O’Connor story that Andrew could think of was Ethel Wilson’s “Hurry, Hurry”.

            Flannery O’Connor’s writing is usually fitted in with the Southern Gothic style, in which the plot is moved forward by an event that is unusual or ironic. In her case it is pointed. She takes familiar characters and then finds their opposites, their incomplete versions or their grotesque inversions that so lack either compassion or self-knowledge that they make the need for god obvious.

            In “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, the grandmother is a “lady”. The characters, especially the violent ones have an inner coherence and an interior logic meant to evoke recognition so that we see them as people like us and thereby don’t dismiss them. The Christian message is that we are no better than they are.

            Andrew at this point told us that he is an atheist.

            She saw the world as being spiritually distorted and wants to JAR people into the awareness of their own spiritual limitations so that this can be corrected. When Andrew said the word “jar” he suddenly slammed his hand on the desk, causing a student in front of him to jump.

            The pattern of her stories is that divine grace descends in a violent manner on the spiritually deficient character who is offered a moment of grace. She is interested in free choice.

            At least one of the characters in each of her stories tends to be a distorted Christ figure.

            In “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, the grandmother is in need of redemption. She is not named in the story and she is “the grandmother” even though she is traveling with not only her grandchildren, but also her son and his wife. Her grandchildren are brats that have no respect for her. She is very much like a child herself in that she is impulsive, doesn’t edit her speech and lies to get what she wants. She seems to be governed by morality, but her morals are those of a “lady”. She is not open to her family’s love, and only cares about herself. She may believe that ladies go to heaven. She doesn’t know that she is racist.

            The mother has a cabbage head, indicating that she is without personality.

            There is a description of the sunlight shining on the trees that finishes with the phrase, “and the meanest of them sparkled”. Andrew went right ahead with the meaning of the word “mean” as in “cruel”, but I suggested that it might be from the other meaning of the word, as in “withholding” and that the trees were perhaps not in bloom. Andrew couldn’t see what I was talking about, and asked me how they would sparkle then. I said that I didn’t know and that I was just thinking about the meaning of the word. Later though, when I got home, I was bugged enough to do a search. I found several articles and books that agreed with my interpretation and a Jesuit site claims that the line is one of O’Connor’s many references to Gerard Manley Hopkins, in this case, his poem, “Pied Beauty”.

            When the family stops at Red Sam’s barbecue restaurant, it is Red Sam himself who declares, “A good man is hard to find.” Red Sam’s wife subtly indicates that her husband is not a good man. At the front of Red Sam’s there is a monkey chained to a tree. One of the students thought that this was meant to indicate an attitude towards Black people that had already been voiced by the grandmother, but that seemed odd to me, and a little racist in itself.

            On their way south, the family of six pass a graveyard with six grave markers.

            The Misfit drives a hearse and he is what kind of figure?

            I said, “Jesus.”

            A young woman behind me started laughing and so Andrew asked her why. She said it was the way I said “Jesus”.

            I asked Andrew how I’d said it and he said that it had sounded like an under the breath curse. Then he suggested that I should do all the sound effects for the course.

            The daytime sky is described to be both sunless and cloudless, which is impossible. This is to emphasize that everything is out of whack.

            When he is being dragged off to the woods the grandmother speaks to her son while looking at The Misfit.

            The grandmother keeps telling The Misfit to pray in hopes of him not killing her. But if she really believes in prayer, shouldn’t she be praying herself?

            In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, Mr. Shiftlet uses intelligence to perform devilry. He is another crooked Christ figure. He is a carpenter. The old woman sees herself as godlike. He says that the spirit is like an automobile because it is always in motion. In the end he drives through a storm to Mobile.

            After class I told Andrew that it was not so strange to have a monkey as a pet in the States a few decades ago. I recounted how when I was visiting my aunt near Boston, her husband had taken me to visit a friend of his that had a monkey chained to a weeping willow in his back yard. The monkey hated children and used to act cute in front of them just to coax them within reach of its chain so it could bite them.

            That night I watched the thirteenth episode of the first season of “Dragnet”. Finally they had a case in which the suspect turned out to be innocent. During an argument, a woman had shot herself in front of her husband. All the evidence pointed towards the husband having killed her, but he insisted, no matter how much they drilled him that he hadn’t done it. The bullet casing though, was found in the living room, and it wouldn’t have flown in that direction if she’d shot himself in the kitchen. She had been making chicken fried steaks and traces of flour were found on the gun muzzle, suggesting that she had put up her hand to stop him from shooting her. The technician though, uncovered that when she had shot herself, the gun fell on the garbage can where she had dumped some of the extra flour and that when the husband came running into the kitchen, he had stepped on the bullet casing and sent it flying into the living room. He was innocent.