Satisfaction

           

            It was raining when I got up on Tuesday morning and though it was fairly warm outside, the heat in my apartment was on full blast and so it was like a jungle. During my yoga I was sweating like the mirror in a shower room. It kept on raining for the next few hours, but I was hoping that it would be one of those days when the rain stops just after sunrise so I would be soaked on my way to class. It stopped around 8:30 as I started getting ready to go.

Earlier that morning Andrew Lesk sent out an email to announce that he was cancelling Short Story class for that day because he had the flu. That meant that I could go home right after Philosophy class, digitize my lecture notes and then clear the way to work on my essay.
            I’ve been listening to a lot of King Crimson concert videos and audio files. Live In Argentina was a good video but some of the audio files are recorded from the audience and they sound horrible because the sound of the band is competing with the sound of the people next to the guy doing the recording.

            Shortly after I headed out it started to rain again, but it wasn’t too bad and I was relatively dry by the time I got to Alumni Hall.

            I overheard a student behind me tell his friend that he had dropped the course, but then he got his essay back and found that he’d gotten an A, and so now he was going through the difficult process of trying to re-enrol in the course.

            Naama arrived early and sat up front because she’d forgotten to charge her laptop the night before and she needed to plug it in. I told her I was confused by her name, because she’d told me it was Naomi but then I saw it written as Naama. She explained that Naomi is for North America because there are too many hassles of having to spell Naama for people or people mispronouncing it.

            We discussed the essay. I told her I was going to write on Nietzsche but was going to have to argue for the most part on his behalf because I agree with the majority of what he says. Naama declared, “I agree with EVERYTHING he says!” She added that she likes a lot of what Heidegger says as well but it’s difficult because he was a Nazi. I argued that Salvador Dali was a fascist but because of that are we going to stop appreciating his paintings? She said, “He’s my favourite painter!” Talk about fascism led to discrimination in general and she told me that though women were allowed into combat in the Israeli army, the Israeli air force for many years would not allow women to become fighter pilots until aeronautical engineer took it to the high court. After a long legal battle, female pilots won the right to fight in the sky.

            I asked Naama what city she was from in Israel but she said she wasn’t from the city, but rather from a small town in the Golan Heights in the north. She commented that it’s strange to go back there after several years to see that nothing has changed and that everyone she went to school with had turned into their parents.

            It was interesting to hear that in Israeli society, after one has left home to join the army and then served one’s term, it’s considered inappropriate to go back to living with one’s parents.

            Professor Gibbs began by commenting on the sunny weather and confessed that he had chosen to sleep in that morning. He expressed the wish that we would enjoy our second nap during his lecture.

            He began the last lecture on Heidegger by telling us that the heart of the 20^th Century had a complicated relationship with nothingness and nihilation. Human beings play a role in the passing away of things though a lot of traditional philosophy is based on the refusal to accept that things pass away.

            Some truths are immune to time. With Being there is change but there is also arriving and leaving.

            The big bang does not mean that something came into existence. There was already stuff there.

            Philosophers were excited about the idea that it is impossible to bring oneself into existence. But can something pass out of existence? Humans call that dying.

            Heidegger’s ideas are thick and woolly but at the same time comfy and proximate.

            A new humanism must take mortality seriously. The heart of Being lies in passing away.

            Nietzsche and Sartre were proud of their atheism, and many ran to humanism because they saw it as atheistic. Heidegger is not an atheist though he’s not really a Christian either. He declared that we are not ready for god until we understand Being and then god can be reconceived.

            Nietzsche saw Christianity as a Platonic religion.

            There are Christian Heideggerians, but Heidegger says that we don’t know the essence of what is holy.

            The traditional approach is that god equals being and that this relates to human essence.

            For Heidegger there is Being and we don’t know what god’s relation to it is. We must first determine Being’s relation to human beings, then the holy and only then look at god or gods.

            A common philosophical argument after World War II was that the holy was closed off.

            Ethics relates to practical as opposed to theoretical philosophy. Ethics is not Heidegger’s radar because it has nothing to do with being, but he would say again; figure out Being in relation to humans before worrying about ethics. Ironically, many scholars have dug up stuff that Heidegger said about ethics and put it forth as Heidegger’s views on ethics, even though he didn’t care about it. He cared about Being and ontology.

            A man’s character is his demon. He is trapped in a wandering machine.

            Heraclitus said that to be human is to dwell in nearness of god.

            The professor illustrated the heaviness of reading Heidegger by describing someone ordering at Starbucks, “I’ll have a Grande with an extra shot and the descent of thinking into the poverty of provisional essence!”  But then he added, “Or if you prefer, a double-double from Tim Hortons. I’m not sure where we are sociologically here.”

            Ordinary things like warming by a stove are the ways of getting to Being.

            For Being to be in question is to have a clue as to how to think about Being.

            Hamlet’s question of “To be or not to be” is not deep enough. We need thinking on Being that is neither practical nor theoretical. Technological thinking about Being is useless.

            Studying Heidegger won’t give you any skills because Heidegger thinks skills are a mistake.

            Let Being come into Being, let Being be, let Being pass away.

            Thinking does not create the house of Being but it leads things into the house. Beings show up at the house of Being in language then stick around and dwell there without sojourning. Persisting allows healing. Thinking is called to do the action of pausing and holding.

            Of the essence of evil, some have the will to destroy.

            Is Being pacific or at war in its heart? Is strife at the pulse of all that is? Most religions think that Being is essentially peaceful.

            Of the difference between “no” and “not”, nihilation is brought into the house of Being as “no”. Every “no” that does not show itself is wilful assertion. (At this time the ink in my pen began to stop showing itself. I had just enough left to write, “Every no is an affirmation of not” before my ink passed out of Being. I searched in my backpack, but found that had been my last pen. All I had left was a fading dried out marker, with which I struggled to take down the last five minutes of the lecture.) The affirmation of not being involves passing away. Being is about nothing. Nothing in stra(indecipherable) of Being. Human beings have got to let die. To be near Being is to be on the way out. (The marker scrawl was looking more and more grey and ghostly) This is not philosophy. This is more attentive. Thinking does not belong to the thinker. Nothing is Being to and from nothing. In human realm, connect with nothing. People do die. And so do pens.

            After the lecture, it wasn’t out of my way home to take University to Queen and to stop at Staples for a pack of pens. I also thought it would be a good idea to buy a ream of paper while I was there. In the line-up for the cashier, a guy in a wheelchair asked a woman that was two ahead of me if he could cut in. She said he could before turning to the people behind her and asking if we minded. What could we do? Turn down the guy in the wheelchair? Of course, he knew we wouldn’t be able to and he had the look of someone who makes a habit of taking advantage of that fact. The cashier was frustrated because she knew that he wasn’t just making a purchase, but rather an exchange, and that would tie up the line even longer.

            That night I watched part of volume one of “Rock Legends: the Best of the 50s, 60s and 70s from the Ed Sullivan Show”. It started with the Beatles and “All My Loving”. They were actually pretty good. There were also The Doors doing “People Are Strange”; The Animals with “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”; The Beach Boys with “Wendy”; The Supremes did a couple of songs, and holy crap, Diana Ross was hot! Creedence Clearwater Revival did “Fortunate Son”; James Brown owned the stage when he sang and danced to “I Feel Good”. Elvis Presley sang and moved to “Hound Dog”, but he had already begun to parody himself. He would stop and laugh in the middle. Of all the performers so far in this collection the two people who owned both the stage and the camera were Jerry Lee Lewis with “Whole Lot Of Shakin Goin On” and Mick Jagger with “Satisfaction”.