Lucy Miranda

           

            Friday was my last Continental Philosophy tutorial.

            Before we got started, I mentioned to Sean about Keagan’s comment during his lecture the day before about Zarathustra being the Ubermensch, and asked if Nietzsche had ever actually said that. Sean said that that is a very controversial claim. Zarathustra is a prophet while the Ubermensch is what’s to come. Someone suggested that it’s Nietzsche. Sean argued that Nietzsche would never claim to be the Ubermensche, but the student confirmed that he meant Zarathustra is Nietzsche. Sean didn’t argue with that.

            Sean began the tutorial with a short talk about Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger. Heidegger is talking about the “Life World”, which is a term that indicates the meaningful matrix of relationships into which we are stitched. Derrida is on board with this.

            The world is linguistic. Heidegger thinks that this is what gives us the potential to understand Being. Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger is that his focus on language is lopsided because of his focus on the spoken form. Derrida says that language is tied to the written form.

            Language is fragile and trembling. Language has a deferral of meaning filtered through it. It’s mediation between the speaker and that to which the speaker refers.

            Sean wrote “déferance” on the board but I think he might have meant “déférence”. He said it’s a combination of difference plus deferral.

            Nietzsche is not just an anti-metaphysician. When reading Heidegger, imagine Nietzsche’s laughter. Even though he was harsh he had a sense of humour. Heidegger has no sense of humour. At this point I started laughing at the idea of this somber philosopher with no sense of humour. Sean agreed that it’s actually quite funny. Sean said that is why we need to hold philosophy lightly.

            Derrida says that the truth is eventual. Any real democracy is always to come. We can’t overcome metaphysics because of language. Truth is a carrot on a stick that we will never catch.

            Although Heidegger is trying hard not to be theological, he really looks like he is.

            Sean quoted my old Philosophy of Sex professor, Ronnie de Souza, who says that we harbour a hankering for objects of unqualified epistemic virtue that prompts us to make bets on the truth. He calls this desire epistemic lust.

            The flashlight can’t illuminate itself. Language discloses but it’s a deferred process.

            Derrida does not take into account the fact that the spoken word preceded the written word. Sean mentioned hieroglyphics and it seemed to me that such a form of writing, unlike ours, does not correspond to the spoken language of the same culture. It reminded me of a science fiction story I’d read a couple of years before so I raised my hand to talk about it. In Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and advanced alien race turns out to have two entirely unrelated languages for speaking and writing. Sean thinks though that hieroglyphics did represent the Egyptian language. It’s interesting though that the Egyptians thought that their written language was the language of the gods.

            Sean referred to the critical triumvirate of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. I found another reference that called them the “masters of suspicion”.

            The meaning of a text is never fixed with the meaning of that text.

            At this point Sean left the room and we did our TA assessments. I’ve been doing them online for the last five years or so and so it was strange and annoying to have to do them on paper. When we were done and they were all in an envelope, Sean returned and told us that we can all consider him on retainer for the rest of our lives. Long after the course, if we have questions we can feel free to email him. He said this is because philosophy is hard.

            Before I left I related a quote from Douglas Adams in which he talked about his experience of what makes a good teacher. He said that the best teachers are those that still remember not knowing what they know. I told Sean that I thought that he fell into that category.

            That afternoon I taught my yoga class at PARC. Only Anna showed up, late as usual. She told me that because she was raised a Brahmin in India she never really learned how to clean up after herself. I wonder if that was the problem for the guy across the hall from me who moved out a few weeks ago, leaving his place unbearably filthy.

            That night I watched the second and third episodes of “I Love Lucy”. Episode two was the first appearance of Fred and Ethel Mertz as Lucy and Ricky’s neighbours and best friends. Fred and Ethel were about to celebrate their eighteenth wedding anniversary and they wanted Lucy and Ricky to join them, but the wives had different ideas as to how to observe the occasion than their husbands did. Lucy and Ethel wanted to go to the Copa while Ricky and Fred wanted to take the girls to the fights. So there was a fight. The women declared they would get dates and go to the Copa without the men. The men decided to get dates so they could go to the Copa and keep an eye on their wives. Both the guys and the gals were having trouble finding someone. Ricky got the idea to call a woman at his club who knows everybody and to get her to arrange some dates for them. Lucy though had the same idea and when she found out that Ricky had already asked her to find them dates, Lucy told her to get the boys dates but for those dates to be Lucy and Ethel in disguise. Their disguises were pretty lame. They posed, dressed and talked like country bumpkins, but they were clearly recognizable to the viewer as Lucy and Ethel. I thought it would have been funnier if they’d gotten totally dolled up to the point of unrecognizability. Anyway, Ricky eventually saw through their disguise and the boys took them out to the Copa after all.

            In the third episode. There was the classic comedy scenario of the husband reading the paper at breakfast and totally ignoring the wife. Lucy kept trying various things, like getting dolled up instead of wearing curlers and pajamas, but Ricky didn’t notice. She told Ethel, “Since we said I do there are so many things that we don’t”. Finally she concluded that Ricky must be homesick for Cuba and so when Ricky came home one day he discovered that Lucy had transformed the apartment into a Cuban village. Ethel played a Cuban record by a female singer and Lucy came out looking like a redheaded Carmen Miranda and lip-syncing the song. At one point though the record sped up and Lucy had to mime it ridiculously fast and then it slowed down and Lucy tried to mimic that as well. Finally Ricky told her that the reason he was with her was because she was nothing like Cuba.