More Human than Human

I watched Blade Runner during Winter Break and it was interesting to see how Ridley Scott, the director, apparently imagined in 1982 the future to be in 2019, with flying cars and replicants, who look like humans but are bioengineered creatures. The movie raises several questions that could be discussed in a Philosophy-blog, but there is one I found particularly interesting: What makes humans human? I am not going to attempt to answer this question, because I feel this is beyond me, since we have been trying to answer this question throughout our first year and as far as I am concerned we didn’t come to an absolute answer, but I would like to share what the movie has to say to this questions. The replicants look like adult humans and are not particularly attractive or so, but they all have superior strength, agility and variable intelligence depending on their model of engineering. But their life span is limited and pre-determined and they lack human emotions. The only way to detect them is to test their emotional responses and empathy by asking them questions. However, their lack of emotions is more and more questioned in the course of the story. The escaped replicants start making their own experiences and added to the memory they got implanted by their creators they develop their own memories and emotions towards them. In the final scene the blade runner, whose job it is to kill the replicants one after the other, fights against one of them and is clearly inferior. The replicant, however, is about to die soon, since his life span is coming to an end and he knows that. Surprisingly, the replicant saves his enemy’s life as he faces his own death. This action seems not to be human, but more human than human. In the end the replicant, the non-human, is the better human being than the “real human”. This interpretation makes it even harder to answer the above stated question. I can only recommend to watch this movie!

(Written: 10th Jan 2010)

How to become a better human being: Be Theatrical!

Theatre was used in ancient Greek as a catharsis. The theory was when you watch theatre and you watched all the pain of life, you would live it through the watching and you would purify your soul. Besides, when you could watch people for example killing in the theatre it was not necessary for you to kill someone yourself. Hence, theatre was thought to help the viewer understand more.

When I played theatre myself, I had to say that I probably learned the lesser from performing at the stage. Certainly it was a good experience to overcome the stage-fright and also to go through this with the whole theatre group, but I think I learned so much more about myself from all the rehearsals before. I had the feeling that for playing theatre the process of developing a play, hence the “way”, is more important than the actual performance, “the aim”. That’s just the final ending, the celebration of the previous work, the reward, but it’s meaningless. Of cause to get applause may be important for your ego and it’s always nice to get rewards, but I think one shouldn’t play theatre for the applause. One should do it for oneself; to get to know yourself better. When you try to be someone else, when you develop a character that is not you, when you invent a new body language, a new voice, a new laugher, a new mimic and gesture, that you can do that only by looking at your own body language, voice, laugher, mimic and gesture. Things you never look at but that define you so much. You get to know yourself and you get to know your limits. When I played theatre I played an old, blind women. I am neither old nor blind, but I am a woman. To find out how my body movement changed when I couldn’t see made me understand what it means to me to be able to see. Suddenly I became so careful and insecure. I was hardly willing to trust anyone when I couldn’t see. Paula blind would be someone else. I would be very different. My ability to see defines me more than I would have thought. I think if I hadn’t played this role I would have never thought about these things and there are many roles I didn’t play and hence there are also many things I am still unaware of. I think it is just true that we sometimes need to lose something to start valuing it. We need to get to know the opposite of what we have to understand what we have. We still define us also by the differentiation of the other. Sometimes it seems that only where the other starts we end. (has a lot to do with identity…). I think to act another character might be an even more effective catharsis. When everyone had the chance to be aggressive on stage maybe there would be less people aggressive in real life. And as I said before, for acting the stage is actually not even needed. To make theatre no audience is necessary. And theatre is a unique possibility, because it’s not dangerous. Whenever I wanted to stop being blind, I stopped. No permanent changes. I think everyone should play theatre at least ones in their life.

(Written: 27th Dec 2009)

Wanne-be Global Citizens

MUWCI makes us to “global citizens”. We think big not limited by the boarders of our nations. When we leave MUWCI we will have friends, who are spread all over the world. When I will hear news I will be more attentive for news from abroad than I was previously because I know the news may concern someone I know from school, a friend. Some of us may continue to travel for the rest of their life and may never go back to their home countries when something like this exists for that person in the first place. I have to say I am happy that I am able to call Germany my home country. I am happy that I have this “home-again” feeling when I am wondering around in Hamburg. I am happy that I am able to be homesick. That there is a place that represents my personal history, where I feel rooted. I know there are people in MUWCI who don’t have that, who lived every two years somewhere else. They don’t have this one place where they feel home every time they come back. I think to have this place that I call home gives me security. I feel - worst case - I can always come back here to Hamburg and I will be save. I am sure this depends to a large extent on the fact that I have family here and the situation would for sure be different when my family would move to another city. Nevertheless there will always be these places like my old school or the lake Alster that will represent a very important period of my life and will always remind me of my childhood and youth, which I spent here without any major interruption. I wonder what it means not to have this. Does it make you more free or do you get lost in the world? I think for me it is very dangerous to think of myself as a global citizen, because in the end I am still very much shaped by the German culture I grew up with. I still perceive myself as a German living in India now. I think I actually never felt my culture so much as I do now when I am abroad. We don’t assimilate in the world. We are not all equal. Global citizen is a concept that is just not possible I think. You cannot embody the world’s cultures and if we would, we would be nothing at all in the end. Also this having friends all over the world I think is meaningless in the end. When we leave MUWCI we will sooner or later lose each other. We are too far away. Even if we would have the means, we cannot jet so much through the world to stay in contact with the friends we make in MUWCI. In the end we will live there were we physically, locally are and that may be in Germany, South Africa, Portugal, Israel, China, Panama … Of cause thanks to the technique it’s not necessary to jet through the world to stay in contact. We can all write mails and exchange picture at facebook and skype with each other. But what kind of friendships are these? Electronic. We cannot be there for each other in times of depressions. We cannot hug each other. And we cannot jump around with each other in times of euphoria. We will do these things with people that are physically around us and one can only have so many close friends. We will lose contact and understanding of each other’s life because our lives will all look so different. I think this is way I am so scared of the end of MUWCI. Because the end is the end.

(Written: 26th Dec 20009)