What Would Nietzsche Think of Donald Trump?

           

            When I got up on Friday morning the street was glistening so that I thought that it was frozen, but it turned out that it was only wet from the snow that was melting as it landed.

            Also when I got up I felt slightly dizzy, and that dizziness persisted through my yoga until it gradually faded from my attention during song practice. I don’t know if it had anything to do with my fast, which I was just over halfway through at that point, but it had certainly never happened before when fasting or not.

            I rode through the dirty mess of slush to get to the Sidney Smith building for tutorial, and when I got there I saw that my pants had been splattered with mud.

            In the hallway while we were waiting for our room to be free, someone asked Sean why Nietzsche talks so much about Buddhism. Sean answered that Nietzsche liked Buddhists because they were atheists but disliked them because they were nihilists.

            Before starting his tutorial, Sean asked if any of us were gamers, and quite a few were. He asked if anyone had heard of the World of Warcraft player created character Leeroy Jenkins. Then he told us that that morning when he went to wake up his six year old for school, he leaned down to gently shake his son awake when the boy suddenly shouted in his ear, “Leeroy Jenkins!”

            Of our paper grades, Sean explained that he gave out a few A minuses and a few Cs, but mostly he gave out Bs. He complained that only ten to fifteen people came to see him about their essays.

            He urged us to take advantage of the fact that he actually gives a shit and predicted that no one else would care about us as much as him for the rest of our time at the academy. I’m not sure what “the academy” is.

            He had intended to only finish up about Nietzsche and get into Heidegger, but we still had so many questions about Nietzsche that it ate up all the time.

            Sedimentation becomes reified in the ascetic ideal. The ascetic ideal is the reification of resentment. It is grounded in the psychology of resentment.

            We use the internalization of the will to create systems that obscure the capacity of the will. Are ideals really merely a bi-product of this? Could you function without ideals? How do we oppose the priestly way of life?

            Nietzsche was against bad conscience but not conscience. He was not anti-discipline.

            Nietzsche is pointing out the problem but he is not the embodiment of the solution.

            The system of self-destruction is traditionally Judeo-Christian, but it doesn’t have to be.

            Nietzsche is calling for a reevaluation of all values. For him it is always a question of value.

            What does knowing do to your capacity to overcome yourself.

            Science is a pretension to objectivity.

            Professor Gibbs had said that the will to power is about dominating others, but I asked if that was really necessary. Couldn’t one turn the will outward without oppressing? Sean said that the domination is inadvertent and that people without the will to power would just be dominated whether that’s someone’s intention or not.

            Knowledge doesn’t care about human beings.

            The two main questions that Nietzsche asks about anything:

            What is its value?

            What is its origin?

            Then, what is its potential?

            Nietzsche doesn’t think that science is bad, just that science doesn’t have the resources to answer these questions.

            For Nietzsche it’s all about health. Crush anything that isn’t good for you. Nietzsche is very moral. He is the first embodied mind theorist.

            God is dead but the damage lives on.

            Someone asked what Nietzsche would think of Donald Trump and Sean thought that was a very good question. He said he would find him course. One needs to hold Nietzsche at the right distance. Too close and he could destroy you. Too far away and he could appear superficially like Donald Trump. Trump has no subtlety and Nietzsche would say that it’s weak to want the kind of power that Trump wants. Trump represents a niche of the US psyche, so he is not surprising.

            We didn’t have a chance to talk about Heidegger, but Sean wanted to throw us a few quick things about him to take with us. Heidegger is a very special thinker. He is both easier and harder than Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Think of him alone in a little cottage in the Black Forest thinking. One needs a nice chair and to read him slowly.

            Heidegger was also an egomaniac who wanted to be the last word in philosophy, after which there would be only poetry.

            I had time after tutorial to go home and sleep for an hour before teaching my yoga class at PARC. Only Anna showed up, late as usual. She lives in the infamous West Lodge Apartments. She said that there was a big safety meeting at the building that day and the media were there. She said that although she is the president of the tenants association, someone else was handling it that day. That struck me as odd. We discussed various methods of getting rid of cockroaches and bedbugs before I started instructing her.

            That evening a guy was walking along the street shouting, but not in an angry way. At one point he picked up one of those orange plastic traffic pylons, which was dirty and full of snow, then put it to his mouth like a megaphone to shout more effectively. I ran for my camera to take a video, but it was too late. I keep forgetting that I have a balcony seat in Parkdale and that I should always have my camera ready. A minute or so later, another man came walking a dog in the other direction. He was shouting that all the terrorists come from Israel.

            That night I finished watching Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, “The Mangler”. Has Tobe Hooper done anything good besides the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre? The villain got top billing because he was played by Robert Englund, who of course is most famous for playing Freddy in the Nightmare On Elm Street series of films. He is so over the top as the bad guy, who wasn’t even in the original story, that his performance is really the only interesting thing about the movie. Ted Irvine, who co-starred in the Monk TV series, played the depressed cop. I deleted the movie when I finished watching it.