On Friday I printed up both of my Continental Philosophy essays with my TA’s comments, plus my responses to his comments in the second paper, and headed to St George and Bloor to meet Sean. I stood outside of room 524, waiting for Sean, while a big, shaved headed janitor mopped the hallway and sang in another language. When he got to where I was standing, I asked him if he wanted me to move. He said, ”If you wouldn’t mind.”, so I stepped behind him onto the wet area.
Sean arrived, announcing that he was
sick again. He has been ill a lot since I met him at the beginning of January.
I wonder if he brings it on himself by always having so much on the go. He
strikes me as one of those people that stuffs twice as much life into each
moment as everyone else and so I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies of old age at
around 45.
Once we were in the room, I told him
that I was disappointed with my grade because my second essay was clearly
better than my first and judging from a comparison of his comments on the two
papers I would discern that he agreed with me. He took some time to bring up my
two essays on his computer so he could discuss them with me. He told me first
of all that my paper was one of the few of our papers that Professor Gibbs had
actually read, and that he’d commented that the mark Sean had given me had been
generous. At that point I threw out the window my chances of carrying my
dispute past Sean. He also informed me that the criteria for marking the second
essays had been much higher. I don’t understand or agree with that. It seems to
me that the same standard should exist throughout the course so students know
how to improve their work. As it is it’s like putting oil on the road for the
second half of a marathon.
Then we started talking specifically
about my essay. He said that I had used both Darwin and Freud in my arguments
against Nietzsche without citing them. That’s true. I wanted to cite them but I
didn’t have time. It seemed necessary though to address Nietzsche’s claim that
conscience is the result of breeding and to show that his idea that bad
conscience results from an internalization of instinct couldn’t be right unless
there’s also an internalized judge, which Freud accounts for with the superego.
Sean said that my essay writing style was too literary for philosophy, which
requires a simple approach. He added that when he first became an undergraduate
he had taken on a double major of philosophy and English, and found that he was
lousy at writing English essays and so he switched to just philosophy. He suggested
that there is also an unkind tone to my writing and that when I argue with a
philosopher like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche I seem to go at it like I have a
grudge against them. I couldn’t really see how that was true, but what can one
do when the person with whom one is debating has a black belt in argument?
It was clear that my mark wasn’t
going to get changed. Sean suggested that I talk to Professor Gibbs but it
seemed to me that if he’d already read my paper and thought the mark had been
generous, there wasn’t much point. I left feeling depressed.
I went to teach my yoga class, but
no one showed up. I was kind of glad for that and I went home half an hour
early.
I began to make notes on Jacques
Derrida’s idea of “proximity” in preparation for my exam. Man as the entity
that “is” is the closest thing to us and the farthest thing away from us or
something like that, maybe.
I watched two episodes of “I Love
Lucy”. In the first, Lucy was trying to teach an elderly woman how to put on a
“come hither” look. But when the old lady tried to awkwardly imitate Lucy, her
facial gestures made her look like she was having a stroke. Also in this
episode, Ricky actually spanks Lucy for wanting to meddle in other people’s
lives. In the second show, Lucy was trying to pretend she was going insane to
show Ricky that stifled dreams of being in show business could lead to mental
illness. At one point Lucy pretended that she thought she was Tallulah
Bankhead.
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