Southern Royalty

           

            On Thursday I rode through the rain to Philosophy class and got uncomfortably though not oppressively damp. I also rode with a wobbly back tire that I thought might have something to do with the axel. On my way home from work the day before, I felt something give and then the wheel started moving from side to side and scraping against the brake pads. I couldn’t fix it then because Bike Pirates is closed on Wednesdays, so I had to ride on it to school and hope it didn’t fall apart. So because of the wheel and because of the rain, as I pedaled to Alumni Hall, I was thinking that it might be a good idea to stay downtown that day between lectures rather than to go home and back.

            There’s an older woman in my class who always says good morning to me. When I arrived this time she approached me to ask if I knew how to turn the lights on in the classroom. I showed her how and then we got to chatting. She’s actually not a student in the class but is rather just auditing the lectures. She did however write a Kierkegaard essay without submitting it. She commented that it’s disturbing to read Heidegger, knowing that he was a Nazi. I pointed out that if we were to let into the foreground the wrong beliefs that the geniuses of history had we wouldn’t appreciate anything they produced.  Salvador Dali was a fascist and Ezra Pound supported the Nazis. I added that if there had been fine print detailing a plan to exterminate the Jews in Nazi party memberships, not very many people would have joined the party. She said her name is Chris and that she’s Greek. She offered to help me if I needed any help with the Greek quotations in the readings. She confessed that she has a hard time talking to the younger students.

            I started setting up my laptop but realized that for the second day in a row I’d forgotten the power cord. I usually keep it in my laptop but a few days before that at the supermarket I’d removed the cord from my backpack and put it into a canvas bag in order to make room for some jugs of orange juice and a few other items. While putting the groceries away I put the cord on the kitchen table and there it stayed, out of context until I’d forgotten it twice. Since I needed it for the Short Story lecture, that meant that after Philosophy I would have to go back home in the rain with my broken bike after all.

            When Professor Gibbs came in I asked him how was Montreal. He answered that it was incredible and that he’d met people at the philosophy conference that he’d wanted to speak with for years.

            He began the lecture by telling us that Heidegger is easy once you get used to it. He added that when we were finished we may not know what it means to be human but we’ll know what it means to read Heidegger.

            An announcement had already been made by email that he’d changed the due date for our essay to Good Friday and that anyone that can’t submit it because of religious reasons should do so the day before. He told us that we could hand in the paper as early as we like, but he cautioned us that even though marks are taken off for every day the essay is late, marks will not be added for every day that the essay is early. He asked if anyone was mad about him postponing the due date on the paper.

            He informed us that our exam will not cover any of the thinkers we’ve written papers on, but will be exclusively on the last two philosophers in our course, namely Levinas and Derrida.

            There is a common assumption that Being is about beings, but Being is not an entity. Being is a perfect condition. We forget the difference and that forgetting leads us to oblivion because oblivion is forgetting. The condition becomes lost. Think of it as paradise lost but without sin. The history of philosophy is not only forgetful but also blind to forgetfulness. Forgetting forgetting is different from forgetting. To rise from oblivion Being must give again so that we can see the difference between Being and beings. This is where thinking comes in.

            Heidegger’s words “homeland” and “homecoming” can be dangerous. Think of its use during World War II, but also of its post 9-11use as in “Homeland Security”. Heidegger’s use of “homeland” is not egoism of the nation. The real homeland is hidden behind nationalism. Its essential sense exists in terms of the history of Being. The homeland is a nearness to being.

            The words: homeland, house, neighbour and dwelling are all localizing. This is settler language that serves to return us from wandering in homelessness back to the house of Being. Homelessness is a symptom of the oblivion of Being where being remains unthought as a lurking shadow notion.

            The word “neighbour” comes from “nearness”. Proximity to Being is more than just a special interval. We are homeless. Homelessness and oblivion are becoming the destiny of human beings and Being. This destiny colludes with nationalism. For Marx, homelessness is alienation. For Heidegger, technology and materialism make up the bad path to oblivion. Environmental thinkers have taken this up. Technology such as mining has caused displacement of populations and ironically we are looking for technological solutions to the problem. Canada mines around the world, and the story is disgusting. I found out later that 75% of the mining on this planet is done by companies based in Canada. When human beings become resources we are in the throe of the technological frame. Thinking has to unthink the obviousness of the technological frame. Both communism and Americanism (consumerism) are two sides of the same technological coin of the forgetting of Being and beings.

            Metaphysics subordinates beings to essences. The essence of human beings consists of being more than merely human. At the heart of essence is the absence of time.

            History is not only a tale of events. It has an ontological quality.

            The human being is not the lord of beings but rather the shepherd. Professor Gibbs paused at this point to say sarcastically, “I’m sure this makes sense.” It sounds pastoral or maybe even Biblical. The shepherd’s goal though is not necessarily to keep all the sheep alive. The bleating of the sheep calls us to the truth of Being. Man is the neighbour of Being. We must be near rather than on top of Being. This “shepherd” stuff doesn’t communicate well.

            Man is in ecstatic dwelling near Being.

            Being is time. The most characteristic aspect of Being is its time. It is not time tied down.

            The task of language is to arrive at a kind of thinking that does not reduce Being to entities. Thinking will return us to a different destiny with language at the core. In our language we capture something. We become higher than we were as top animal but it’s more dangerous. From master to shepherd.

            Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is a wholesale attack on philosophy. His opposition is not merely a negation. He is interested through his negation in opening up other vistas. The response was that he was lowering what it means to be human to barbarism, brutality and nihilism. “Humanism” is a dangerous word. If we keep it we need it to be something wild. The essence of man matters for the truth of Being. Humanism does not see the human as another entity but rather in relation to Being. Everything that is is bound up to being.

            If one knocks off for a piece in the metaphysical frame, one is a bad person.

            There are other kinds of logic than rational thought and argument. There is a way to link things.

            Heidegger is opposed to values because they depend upon the willfulness of the valuator. What you value is what you will, but more important is what you Let Be.

            Being in the world is not against transcendence. It’s just that it has to happen in the world and not in another world.

            Nietzsche denied god, but Heidegger says that it is not a mistake to believe. He sounds pagan though when he talks of “gods” rather than “god”. Existentialists are mixed up about god. Heidegger says that we first must figure out what a human being is. If we get to something primeval about man then we are approaching Being. We must first learn about human beings as shepherds of Being.

            Germans are now alienated from the word “heil”, but it means “holy”. We need to think of the essence of “holy”.

            Heidegger is not interested in ethics but rather points to a new direction of thinking about ethics.

            After lecture, Eric asked the professor who builds the house of Being. He answered “the poets”.

            It was still raining as I rode home, though not quite as hard. I was constantly worried that my back wheel was going to fall off. I changed to dry clothing, spent some time on my computer and then went to sleep for a while. By the time I started back downtown it was hardly raining at all.

            At the end of class on Tuesday, Andrew Lesk had given us a sheet of questions about the Flannery O’Connor story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”. On Thursday he once again divided us into groups and I was in a group with five others, looking at what the first few paragraphs establish about the mother in the story. I said that it establishes her as a racist but also that she doesn’t know any better. Andrew and I argued a bit about whether her unknowingness gives her a pass. I said that it kind of does. Her great grandfather lives in the memory of the former glory of her family when her great grandfather owned a hundred slaves, and she still sees herself as southern royalty. Her son appears at first to be anti-racist but it is established in the beginning that he was opposed to everything about his mother and so his lack of racism seems to be an act of rebellion against her. He imagines himself shocking her by bringing home a “suspiciously Negroid” woman, meaning a woman of mixed race that could probably pass for White. He doesn’t actually even consider bringing home a Black woman.

            On the way home it occurred to me that something other than the axel might be the problem with my back wheel. I dropped off some groceries at my place and then checked to confirm that what I had was a broken spoke. I took my bike five doors down to Bike Pirates. The back area looked pretty full. The loud bald guy with the beard who always sounds like he owns the place said, “What’s up?” as I came in and it sounded like a challenge. I asked if there was room but he told me there wasn’t and that there probably wouldn’t be a free rack before closing time. I decided to wait just in case. I was there on the couch for about 45 minutes. The loud guy was making a big pot of soup while a woman was doing the dishes. He bragged that he makes the best cheeseburger in the world.

            When 18:30 approached, a friendly volunteer came to inform me that there wasn’t going to be a free rack before closing time. When he found out that the problem was a broken spoke he considered letting me try to repair it without a rack, but when he asked the loud guy he said no. Since they would not be open again until Saturday, I asked the loud guy if it was safe to ride downtown on Friday with a broken spoke. He advised me that if it’s under an hour of riding and I avoid the potholes that caused the spoke to break in the first place, I should be okay until Saturday.

            Thursday was the last day of my two-week fast. A few days before that I’d bought three net bags of avocadoes, the contents of which ripened very slowly. That night I cut them up and found that almost every one of them was bad and probably had been from the time I’d purchased them. By picking through the insides of about twenty avocadoes I managed to retrieve the equivalent of, at best, two.