Reflecting the Absurd

Reflecting the assignment

To be honest, beginning to search for an assignment topic really made me feel lost. I had no idea what I could possibly write 1000 words about. Especially when it comes to writing in a critical thinking way and connecting this topic to my subject,  communication design, was a challenge.

Luckily, after some informative meetings, I got an idea what to write about.
First, I considered writing about Martin Heidegger’s “The Question concerning Technology” and how this could be linked to the job description of a media designer and the addiction to technical devices.
After doing some research I figured, that this topic is way too broad and that it would not be possible to write a proper assignment about such an extensive theme. This is why I focused on only one aspect of Heidegger’s approach. As my central theme I chose reality and how it is used in modern technologies, for example in the case of augmented reality.

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Reflecting Constellation: “The Many Guises of the Absurd”

In the beginning I was shocked and thought that we would constantly deal with suicide and nihilistic topics throughout the course. However, after a while I realized that this lecture is not all doom and gloom and that the concept does not only consist of depressed medicine-using people who regard suicide to be the only answer. Optimism can also be found. For me it was very informative to have a lecture about critical thinking and how different topics still have many things in common.

#3 reading Task

Thomas Nagel –  What it is like to be a bat

“What it is like to be a bat” deals with the different levels of consciousness and alienation. The text certainly provides a good stimulus on the subject of awareness and shows the limits of understanding other consciousness. In this case, he speaks of bats, but it might be just a metaphor for people, whose actual reception we cannot possibly understand. I can only imagine how I would feel being in the place of the bat, which is almost impossible. Especially regarding the different senses a human has compared to a bat.

 

#2 Absurd

The second lecture was about the two types of existence.
Unconscious being (being-in-itself) and conscious being (being-for-itself) (Sartre).
Facticity and transcendence and how children fit in this theory.

We had a discussion about what we think about the theory of two types of existence.
In my opinion, it all deals with uprising and what people are told to do or not to do.
For example: The character of every child is unformed in the process of learning and growing up. This is why you cannot simply assign children to one of the two types.
The child’s parents do their best to raise their child, dealing with a desire for peace and a place to be, which is fundamental to our well-being.
This topic mainly deals with alienation. Parents could only guess how the child feels, what it is thinking or what it might want to do.

So where do animals fit into this theory?

Animals have a different level of consciousness. Their owners taught them “yes” and “no”. This is why the owners represent the parental role, who would usually rise them. One example is Pawlow, who conditioned dogs’ reflexes to co-occur with specific signals.

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Questions to deal with:

Are people innately good?
Who said that murdering is bad?
What’s the meaning of life?
Is suicide the only way out?

What is point?

#1 Absurd

The Many Guises of the Absurd

In the beginning, I was a bit skeptical regarding this kind of lecture. For me, constellation was the most impalpable  lecture of all three, because we do not have anything comparable in Germany. However, there was a picture of a cat with a melon, so what could probably go wrong?!

To be honest – after the first lecture I was quite astonished.Not suspecting something bad constellation happened. After a while I figured, that absurdity is not only about comedy. You can find it everywhere. Our tutor showed us some artists dealing with the absurd topics like e.g. Ron Mueck, Dali and Monty Phyton.

We had to prepare short presentations dealing with existentialists. Existentialism is a philosophical concept and also a kind of absurdity.